Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aphorisms and Observations

  • Distaff Tribalism

    You may complain, with justification, that women are more tribal than men, but the point needs to be balanced by the observation that they are also more familial, social, communal, helpful, group-oriented, and nurturing. Where would we be without them?

  • You Know You Love Her . . .

    . . .  when you find charming in her what would be annoying in others.  

  • Political Parsimony

    Do not multiply enemies beyond necessity. William of Ockham: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. William of Alhambra: Inimici non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Enemies are worse than friends are good. The enmity of the enemy is more to be feared than the friendship of the friend is to be desired. But show me a man…

  • Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

    Top o' the Stack

  • Grievance and a Life Well-Lived

    A life well-lived cannot have grievance as its organizing principle.

  • Consolation

    There is some consolation in the thought that Rome did not fall in a day.  The older you are, the greater the consolation.

  • A Philosopher’s Last Words

    What I haven't been able to learn by living, I now hope to learn by dying.

  • An Extreme Form of Preaching to the Choir

    Talking to oneself in the wee hours, rehearsing a rant, as the caffeine kicks in.

  • Kitsch

    Kitsch is art's comfort food: familiar, reliable in its satisfactions, readily available, not particularly nourishing, but also not challenging to its consumers, remunerative for its producers.

  • Dialogue and Monologue

    A dialogue is not a confrontation between two monologues. (Inspired by Frithjof Schuon)

  • Against Specialization

    "Specialization is for insects." (Robert A. Heinlein) If so, there is no 'insect' like the hyper-specialized analytic philosopher. (See here for quotation and context.) The true philosopher is "a spectator of all time and existence," (Plato) and of everything sublunary and superlunary. Panoptics and synoptics are the optics of the true philosopher.  Spinoza the lens-grinder…

  • Juvenilia

    I pulled out my scribblings from the summer of '66.  Puerile stuff from a half-century ago. Painful in places.  But earnest and sincere with a good line here and there.  The old man honors the adolescent he was. I wrote for posterity, though I didn't realize it at the time.  And I still do.  The…

  • One Man’s Pedantry . . .

    . . . is another man's precision.

  • Continence

    There is continence sexual and gustatory. Custody of the eyes and of the heart are forms of continence.  Continence should also extend to rebuttals, replies, ripostes, rejoinders, responses, and reactions. Deny yourself the desire for vindication, and getting in the last word. Better retraction than self-serving reaction. The self denied is the ego; the self that…

  • The Main Argument against Secular Humanism

    Humans.