Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aphorisms and Observations

  • Reality

    Try to figure out what it is and then face it.

  • Life’s Optics Versus Thought’s Synoptics

    One cannot live without being onesided, without choosing, preferring, favoring oneself and one's own, without staking out and defending one's bit of ground.  One cannot live without being onesided, but one cannot be much of a philosopher if one is.  The philosopher's optics are a synoptics, but life's optics are perspectival. And so philosophy is enlivened at…

  • Food and Sex

    We have it on good authority that man does not live by bread alone. To which I add: nor by bed alone.

  • ‘Experience’

    The Mayo Clinic sent me a brochure containing the line, "Most patients begin their experience at the outpatient clinic." Now I don't know about you, but when I seek medical attention it is not an experience I want but treatment. If I could get the treatment without the experience, so much the better.  Similarly, when…

  • On Redundancy

    Redundancy is a stylistic flaw at worst. A noted chess writer advises, "You need to get psyched up within your own mind." One does indeed need to get psyched up to play well. But is it possible to get psyched   up in someone else's mind, or outside any mind?  So the admonition is redundant and…

  • Untranslatable? Then Not Worth Translating!

    When I hear it said that some text is untranslatable, my stock response is that in that case the text is not worth translating.  If it cannot be translated out of Sanskrit or Turkish or German, then what universal human interest could it have? The truth is one, universal, and absolute.  If you have something to say that…

  • His Inner Kantian

    Becoming increasingly in touch with his 'inner Kantian,' he travelled less and less as the years rolled on.  He decided he had seen enough phenomena, and that seeing more would not bring him closer to any noumena.

  • Platitude

    Better a true platitude than a false bit of originality.

  • Some Atheists

    Those atheists who mock religion mock the craving for ultimate meaning.  So no matter how clever they are they are quite stupid when it comes to the human heart.  Atheism in these mockers is rooted in spiritual vacancy.

  • Life is Fleeting

    The 'is' gladdens, the 'fleeting' saddens.

  • Serious Reading and Bed Reading

    There is serious reading and there is bed reading. Serious reading is for stretching the mind and improving the soul. It cannot be well done in bed but requires the alertness and seriousness provided by desk, hard chair, note taking and coffee drinking. It is a pleasure, but one stiffened with an alloy of discipline.…

  • Concluding and Deciding

    How many concludings are at least in part decidings?

  • Political Parsimony

    The politically parsimonious do not multiply agencies beyond necessity.

  • Moral Corruption

    The corruption in institutions is first in the human heart.  But we are able to recognize it in both places. And that provides a slim basis for hope.  A totally corrupt being would presumably be blind to his own corruption.  The benighted who know they are in the dark are not completely lost.

  • The Bigger the Government . . .

    . . . the smaller the citizen. (Dennis Prager) . . . the more to fight over. (Vallicella) . . . the bigger the debt. (Vallicella glossing Medved)