Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Sage Advice

  • The Custody of the Heart

    If you practice the custody of the heart, it may save you from unnecessary folly — as delightful as romantic follies can be.  Do you feel yourself falling in love with your neighbor's wife?  Don't tell yourself you can't help it. Don't hijack Pascal's "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."  Get…

  • The Art of Life

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

  • Vanitas

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

  • Sophia

    The word flashed before my mind when the alarm went off.  The love of wisdom is real in some of us, but the attainment of wisdom may be forever beyond all of us. To live well, however, we must live as if wisdom is attainable, if not in this life, then in the next.  And…

  • Keep Your Own Counsel

    That is my advice.  Now apply it to what I have just advised.

  • What Should You Do in the Aftermath of the ‘Brexit’ Vote?

    First off, hats off!  to the Brits, or at least to those of their number who voted Leave.   But now what should we do financially speaking?  Expect turmoil in the markets.  The stock market was down when I checked it a few hours ago.  But gold  and other precious metals were up.  Good news…

  • Keep Your Own Counsel

    That is my advice. Now apply it to what I have just advised.

  • Know Your Limits

    Cautionary tale: Geraldine Largay's Wrong Turn: Death on the Appalachian Trail The Never Hike Alone warning found in most hiking books is not just a piece of CYA boilerplate required by publishers.  It is good advice.  I have violated it numerous times in unforgiving country in quest of my inner Thoreauvian, but then I am extremely…

  • Sunday Morning Sermon: Life Well Lived

    To make good use of your time in this world, think of your life above all as a quest, a seeking, a searching, a striving.  For what?  For the ultimate in reality, truth, value, and for their existential appropriation.   One appropriates reality by being authentic, truth by being truthful, values and norms by living…

  • A Time to be Careful

    It is admirable to speak the truth courageously in your own name, but the exercise of civil courage might cost you and yours dearly. So I feel duty-bound to warn my younger readers.  This is a time to be very careful.  The following from Journal of American Greatness: Who Are We? Who are you? You…

  • Results, not Genesis

    A philosophical paper ought to record the results, not the genesis, of the author's thought about a topic.  In this hyperkinetic age it is a good writerly maxim to state one's thesis succinctly at the outset and sketch one's overall argument before plunging into the dialectic.

  • Is Age Only a Number?

    Some say age is only a number.  Not quite.   It is a number that measures something.  You may as well say that temperature is only a number; you are only as hot as you feel.   Face reality, but don't exaggerate how bad things are.  

  • Anchorage in the Certain

    We should anchor our thought in that which is most certain: the fact of change, the nearness of death, that things exist, that one is conscious, that one can say 'I' and mean it, the fact of conscience.  But man does not meditate on the certain; he chases after the uncertain and ephemeral: name and…

  • Best to be Neither Poor Nor Rich

    To be neither poor nor rich is best for the truth seeker.  The poor can think only of their poverty and its alleviation, the rich of their wealth and its preservation.  The few exceptions 'prove' the rule.

  • Advice for the Young

    Beware of internalizing your parents' and relatives' attitudes, their harsh, unsympathetic, 'practical' attitudes and suggestions especially as regards what is tender, fledgling, open, searching, trusting, idealistic and unworldly in yourself.  Beware of dismissing or discounting your young self, the young self that was and the one that still is.  One must treat oneself critically but…