Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Philosophical Anthropology

  • Cat and Man

    From the journal of a cat man. The cat is happy to reside within his limits: he does not aspire. He is incapable of hubris. There are no feline tragedies. A cat can be miserable, and so can a man, but only a man can be wretched. A man is an animal, but an abyss…

  • Age Quod Agis: Agent and Awareness

    Too much attention is wasted on what we did do and what we will do, and not enough on what we are doing. Age quod agis. "Do what you are doing."  A excellent maxim. A non-philosopher will take it as such and then move on. The philosopher lingers and goes deeper. Verbally a tautology, the…

  • Neither Angel nor Beast

    I read the Sufi mystic Rūmī  (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. The following observation from my Turkish journal is surrounded by quotations from him so he may have been the source of the idea.  Angels were created with reason, brutes with lust, man with both. A man who follows reason is higher than…

  • On the Eternal in Man

    Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 67, #263, written 1940): The man who explicitly does not believe and does not will to believe (for the will to believe belongs to believing) in an eternal life, that is to say in a personal life after death, will become an animal,…

  • Neither Angel nor Beast

    Blaise Pascal, Pensées #329: Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast. The first half of the thought is unexceptionable: man is indeed neither angel nor beast, but, amphibious as he is between matter and spirit, a hybrid and a riddle to himself. The second…

  • Self-Love and Self-Respect

    Self-love can extend to love of the smell of one's own excrement, at which point self-respect raises an eyebrow. But are we not just clever land mammals? How is self-respect possible for such critters? It is actual, so it is possible. 

  • What is Man?

    He is an animal, but also a spirit — and thus a riddle to himself. He reasons and speaks, he objectifies, he says 'I' and he means it. He does not parrot the word 'I' in the manner of a parrot or a voice synthesizer; uttering 'I' he expresses self-awareness.  Man has a world (Welt),…

  • Is There a Defensible Sense in Which Human Beings are Equal?

    My brand of conservatism is personalist, which may help explain why I find myself at loggerheads with those on the so-called 'Alternative Right.'  And my brand of personalism is conservative which may help explain why I look askance at libertarianism and at 'mainstream conservatism' to the extent that the latter is libertarian and insufficiently attentive…

  • Patrick Toner on Hylomorphic Animalism

    Herewith, some  comments on and questions about Patrick Toner's fascinating paper, "Hylemorphic Animalism" (Philos Stud, 2011, 155: 65-81).  Patrick Toner takes an animalist line on human persons.  Animalism is the doctrine that each of us is identical to an animal organism.  A bit more precisely, "Animalism involves two claims: (1) we are human persons and…