St. Gregory of Nyssa (335-394), in his work On the Soul and Resurrection (St. Vladmir’s Seminary Press, 1993), presents a very stimulating dialogue between two characters: Gregory and his sister Macrina. Through Macrina he argues that the existence of virtue… Read more ›
Plato, in his dialogue Phaedo, has Socrates refer to philosophy as “the practice of death”. In the dialogue, this practice is presented as one in which the philosopher tries to remove herself from the seductions of the sensible world in… Read more ›
What is the relation between logos (speech, reason) and eros (love)? Some say there is no relation since love is just a matter of emotions, feelings, passions, and actions. But according to Plato’s developmental vision of eros encountered in his… Read more ›
The philosopher John Rawls, in the beginning of his classic book A Theory of Justice, wrote the following intuitively appealing description of justice: “Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory… Read more ›
In his classic work On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) claimed that the freedom of thought and discussion was indispensable to a free society. Mill’s argument in defense of this freedom revolves around fallibilism or the view that no… Read more ›
Plato’s (427-347 B.C.) Republic is primarily a book, despite its many themes and topics, about justice in the soul and the state. Socrates’ analysis of justice is undertaken to justify the claim that we should all be virtuous even if we… Read more ›
In his book On Dialogue (Routledge, 1996), the late theoretical physicist David Bohm wrote: “On the whole, you could say that if you are defending your opinions you are not serious” (48). Bohm argues that real dialogue is marked by… Read more ›
In Plato’s Symposium we learn that love is the desire for the continued possession of the Good (206a-b) and that the Good is ultimately eternal Being that is timeless and always “the same in every way” (208b). Thus the goal… Read more ›
How is it that we can experience incoming data from the five senses as coherent, rather than incoherent, perceptions of objects and people? This issue, often referred to as “the binding problem” in neuroscience, has been a concern of philosophers… Read more ›
In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus there is an interesting exchange between Theuth, the old God who invented writing, and King Thamus, the man who is critical of it: “But when it came to writing, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians… Read more ›
In his essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” William James (1842-1910) argues that our ideals and ideas are intimately associated with our feelings. This can be a good thing since feelings both enable our ideas about things to… Read more ›
Shakespeare’s Richard III, although fairly simple in structure, is rich in philosophical insights. In this series of posts I will explore many of these insights. Let’s begin by looking at how the play illustrates stages of tyranny that can be… Read more ›
In the last two posts I considered Plato’s argument for the immortality of the soul that appears in book X of his dialogue Republic. Now I would like to say a few words about how the theme of immortality can… Read more ›
In his book The Courage to Teach,[1] Parker J. Palmer claims that objectivism is false and that a new conception of truth needs to be put in its place. Without this new conception we will perpetuate “disconnections between teachers, their… Read more ›
A student recently declared that philosophy and science, while interesting, simply can’t get very far given the “fragility” of our minds which, after all, are beset by all kinds of things, such as emotions, neuroses, defense mechanisms, fallacious reasoning, limited… Read more ›