Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aphorisms and Observations

  • Envy

    Given our manifold limitations, it is a wonder that anyone could feel envy for another. How petty and wretched you must be to feel diminished by a minor success of mine!

  • The ‘Liberal’

    She knows how to signal her virtue, but not her turns or lane changes. 

  • A Nice Thing about Philosophy

    One nice thing about philosophy is that one can often argue in a pleasant and gentlemanly way because little is at stake. It is unlikely that anyone will get up in arms, literally or figuratively, over the East coast versus the West coast interpretation of the noema in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.  I don't…

  • Pleasures of the Flesh, Mind, Spirit

    Those who pursue the pleasures of the flesh alone do not know any better: they do not know the pleasures of the mind. Those who pursue the sensuous and intellectual pleasures alone know no better: they do not know the pleasures of the spirit resting in contemplative silence. All seek pleasure; your measure, however, is…

  • The Left’s Ingratitude

    How ungrateful, and how wrong, to sneer at the very conditions of one's own existence, activity, and well-being! Nature and society, church and state, language and institutions, culture and mores, everything that one finds and was given, that one did not make, cannot make, and can improve only to a limited extent, and only with…

  • Die Verkehrte Welt

    The world of the leftist is an inverted world in which making things worse is called 'reform.' 

  • Man is a Project

    To believe in oneself is to believe beyond the evidence.

  • Civility

    Civility is no virtue if a cover for cowardice.

  • Ancient Eyes and Old Souls

    The eyes of the elderly are rarely the windows of old souls; in most they bespeak vacancy. Either aging has dirtied the panes or else there was little or no soul behind them to begin with.

  • History

    History may have lessons to teach us, but we don't agree on what they are; so we learn nothing usefully applicable to the present.

  • Epistemic Bluster

    Man, who boasts of his knowledge, does not even know what knowledge is. ……………………. The thought is from Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), Apology for Raymond Sebond, trs. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, Hackett Publishing, 2003, p. 12. The Apology first saw the light of day in 1580.

  • “Ignorance of the Law is No Excuse”

    AN EMINENTLY REASONABLE PRINCIPLE, but only if the law can be known by the average citizen who exercises appropriate diligence.  For that exercise of due diligence to be possible, however, laws must be relatively few in number, rational in content, and plainly stated.  If that were the case, then ignorance of the law would be…

  • Hunger and Satiety

    You should be hungry before every meal and sated after none.

  • Duty and Inclination

    It is one's duty to control one's inclinations despite the strong inclination to dismiss one's duty.

  • Tough and Forebearing

    It is better to be tough on oneself and forebearing toward others than the other way around.