Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aphorisms and Observations

  • True Community

    A true community is made of and by individuals, and individuals are made by solitude. True community is as much a task as self-individuation. 

  • Modus Trollens

    The modus operandi of the cyberpunk.

  • The Optics of Compassion

    We make a brave attempt at seeing the best in one another. The attempt is aided by not looking too closely.

  • Italicizing and Underlining

    The writer italicizes what he hopes the reader would underline were there no italicization.

  • Moral Progress

    A large part of moral progress is progress in the realization of how much you need it. So, initially at least, the recession of the goal as you approach it indicates progress toward it.

  • All is Fleeting

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

  • Truth and Decision

    One cannot decide what the truth is. But one can and must decide what one will accept and live by as the truth.

  • The Odd Man Out Among the Cardinal Virtues

    It is always prudent to be prudent, temperate, and just, but often imprudent to be courageous.

  • His Story

    History is largely His Story, but part of that story is how place was made, by men mainly, but not solely, for Her Story. 

  • I Know My Limits

    I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know.   Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible.  (Note how 'I' is used above.  It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is…

  • Augustine was Right

    It is our love of the Unchanging Light, a love unconscious of itself and grotesquely diffracted into creatures, that animates our inordinate love of them. 

  • Against Marx

    "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." (Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, #11) No, the point is to understand it, and to understand it so well that one understands that it cannot be changed in any but metaphysically inessential and unimportant ways.

  • Pleasure in the Petty

    We humans are ineluctably petty in various ways. It can't helped. And so we can't be faulted for the occasional pleasure we take in the petty particulars of the quotidian round, such as the way the towels are arranged on the rack or the way the lazy cats are splayed upon the bed.

  • Quality and Equality

    Quality of life is what counts, not equality of outcome. To enforce the latter is to destroy the former.

  • The Less I Know of You . . .

    . . . the more highly I can think of you. And the more highly I think of myself, the less I know of myself.