Tag: Plato

Aristophanes

6,912 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Strepsiades Flunks Out

It hasn’t gone well. First Socrates bursts out of the Thinkery swearing an oath: “By Respiration, by Chaos, by the Air.” The usual places of gods in his oath are occupied by three natural forces. Socrates then rants about a particularly bad student who is “rustic . . . resourceless . . . dull . . . and forgetful.” Then he calls this student to come out. And out comes Strepsiades.

Socrates then quizzes Strepsiades on what he has learned. (more…)

9,802 words

Author’s Note:

This is a substantially edited transcript of a 1998 lecture on Plato’s Apology of Socrates. The translation is from Plato and Aristophanes, Four Texts on Socrates: Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito and Aristophanes’ Clouds, trans. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). Paraphrases are placed in ‘single quotes,’ whereas actual quotes appear in “quotation marks.” (more…)

1,632 words

The man . . . has equipped himself with many things for his journey. — Franz Kafka, “Before the Law”

While I have life and strength I shall never cease from the teaching and practice of philosophy. — Socrates, Plato’s Apology (more…)

8,770 words

The following essay on Plato’s Theages is based on a transcript of a taped lecture, which I revised based on notes for two later lectures on the same dialogue that offered a more complete interpretation. I want to thank V.S. for the original transcript.

The Theages is a short Platonic dialogue that can be read as a response to Aristophanes’ Clouds. In both texts, Socrates is approached by a country gentleman to educate his son. In the Clouds, the father is insistent, the son reluctant. (more…)

7,590 words

1. Knowledge of the Right Use of All Things

To explain what philosophy is, we always have to go back to the beginning. Pythagoras (ca. 570-495 BC) is said to have been confronted by Leon, the tyrant of Philius, who demanded to know if he was wise. He responded that he was not a wise man, but merely a φιλόσοφος (philosophos), a “lover of wisdom”; a practitioner of φιλοσοφία (philosophia). Φίλος (philos) means “love,” and σοφῐ́ᾱ (sophia) means “wisdom.” (more…)

6,502 words

Part 4 of 4 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

5. Critique of Magical Idealism (Continued)

(b) How strong is Evola’s case for idealism?

I noted earlier that Evola sums up his idealism using Berkeley’s famous expression esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). (more…)

2,127 words

There is a time for us to wander.
When time is young and so are we.
The woods are greener over yonder.
The path is new, the world is free.
There is a time when leaves are fallin’.
The woods are gray, the paths are old.
The snow will come when geese are callin.’
You need a fire against the cold.
— The Dillards, “There is a Time,” 1963 (more…)

Terror Antiquus, L. Bakst (1908)

6,674 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Prologue: Little Pine Lake

The first time I got lost, it was because of a map. It was Easter in my grandparents’ home of Marshall, Texas, and during that golden-age glow that now suffuses the nineties. (more…)

5,781 words

Guillaume Durocher
The Ancient Ethnostate: Biopolitical Thought in Classical Greece
Self-published, 2021

It almost goes without saying that any book written today by someone from the Dissident Right on the subject of Classical Greece will be more accurate to the spirit of antiquity and more honest about the racial realities that underlie it than anything that could be published in contemporary academia. This book gives a good survey of the history, culture, and ideas of key writers of various sorts in Ancient Greece. (more…)

Renaud Camus

3,354 words

Renaud Camus
Le Grand Remplacement, 5th edition
Plieux: Chez l’auteur, 2019

Renaud Camus (b. 1946) is the French author of over 160 books, but only one of these is currently in print in English: an anthology of excerpts from his works, You Will Not Replace Us!, which was self-published in 2018. (more…)

1,705 words

It was said by sages of old that matter is an illusion — not because it “isn’t real,” whatever that means, but rather because it is always in motion and always changing. Therefore, as soon as one perceives and understands its state it has already changed, and the idea one has about it is no longer true. At best, one perceives what it was, but never what it is. (more…)

6,383 words

1. Introduction: Remind me, why Fichte?

Readers have been asking me why I am devoting multiple essays to J. G. Fichte, an exceedingly difficult and seldom-read German Idealist born in 1762. The simple answer is that these essays are a continuation of my series on Heidegger’s “history of metaphysics.” Having devoted several essays to Kant, I am continuing with Fichte, then will move on to Schelling and Hegel, and then, finally, to Nietzsche. (more…)