Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Human Predicament

  • Impotent Transcendence

    Awareness of our limits suggests that we are beyond them. But it is an impotent transcendence that leaves us stuck with them.

  • Are We Sick?

    If we are just animals, why aren't we content to be just animals?

  • If Obituaries Were Objective . . .

    . . . some of them might read like this. Professor X was a good teacher and colleague. Affable and self-effacing, he was well-liked by all. He was quick with a joke and to light up your smoke — at least back in the good old days when some of us smoked in our offices…

  • Can Friendship Survive Deep Disagreement?

    Clearly friendship can survive deep disagreement if it is over some abstruse topic in the philosophy of language, say. The question I intend, however, is whether friendship can continue among those who find themselves in profound disagreement over matters that touch us 'existentially.' Politics and religion supply plenty of examples.  Here too friendship can survive…

  • The Evil of Ignorance

    It is an evil state we are in, ignorant as we are of the ultimate why and wherefore. The topic of birthdays came up among some friends. I said I don't celebrate mine: my birth befell me; it was not my doing. A female companion replied that life is a gift to which my response…

  • Socializing as Self-Denial

    You don't really want to go to that Christmas party where you will eat what you don't need to eat, drink what you don't need to drink, and dissipate your inwardness in pointless chit-chat.  But you were invited and your non-attendance may be taken amiss.  So you remind yourself that self-denial is good and that it is…

  • The Eremitic Option

    Monks come in two kinds, the cenobites and the eremites or hermits.  The cenobites live in community whereas the hermits go off on their own.  Eremos in Greek means desert, and there are many different motives for moving into the desert either literally or figuratively. There are those whose serious psychological conditions make it impossible…

  • Time Balm

    Time flattens the peaks of emotion and fills the valleys of despond.  Tormentors from the past are now shades pale and insubstantial, too weak to haunt.  Absence wins out over presence.  One needn't work at the purgation of memory: time does the work for us.

  • Human Predicament

    It angers us that what angers us does not anger others.

  • The Art of Life

    The standoffish are not liked.  The obsequious are not respected.  Tread the middle path.

  • Suggestibility

    People are astonishingly suggestible.  But is suggestibility always bad?  Belonging to a community of believers reinforces one in one's belief. If the belief is true and life-enhancing, then so is the suggestibility that promotes it. Related articles A Part-Time Monk's Solution to Suggestibility Colin McGinn on Brigand Lighter Aquinas and Why the New Atheists are…

  • Vanitas

    Live life to the full to appreciate that it is empty.

  • People Have Their Uses

    We need those distorting mirrors called other people to achieve self-knowledge.  For a distorting mirror, while it distorts, also mirrors.

  • Homo Loquax

    You know the type.  The one whose lack of understanding of a subject is no barrier to his talking about it.

  • Clinton Cash, The Movie

    Official trailer. Money, power, sex, and recognition form what I call the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. Hillary specializes in the inordinate love of the first two, Bill in the inordinate love of the second.