DiotimosReading Desk
Category

Philosophy

Every in-library item filed under this category, newest first, with its research summary and organization.

11 itemsCategory: Philosophy · newest first
  1. Feature

    Would Kant's Dove Fly Better in Empty Space?

    In the introduction to the *Critique of Pure Reason*, Kant pictures a dove that feels the air pushing against its wings and imagines it would fly better without any air at all, and says that this is what Plato did when he left the world of the senses for the world of ideas. This explainer takes the figure apart: what the dove is supposed to show about reason and experience, why the physics makes Kant's point better than Kant says, where the comparison fits Plato and where Plato had already made it himself, and how the dove became, in Wittgenstein, a philosopher on ice who wants to walk.

    Philosophy
  2. Feature

    Reading Spinoza's Ethics: Why a Book About Blessedness Looks Like Euclid

    Spinoza's *Ethics*, written in Latin between 1661 and 1675 and published only after his death in 1677, is laid out like a geometry textbook: definitions, axioms, numbered propositions, each followed by its proof and the letters Q.E.D. Its subject is God, the mind, the emotions, human bondage, and the way to freedom, and its last page is about blessedness. This introduction asks why a book with that subject was built in that shape, shows a new reader how the first definitions carry the whole structure, and argues that the geometry is not a wrapper around the argument but part of the cure the argument prescribes.

    Philosophy
  3. Feature

    I Pardon You This Time

    Seneca's account, near the end of his treatise on anger, of the evening examination he learned from Sextius and kept himself: three questions put to the spirit when the lamp is out, read with the sentence on the senses that precedes it, the two examples of pleading that follow it, and the older Pythagorean rule it descends from.

    Philosophy
  4. Feature

    More Things in Heaven and Earth

    Hamlet's "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" is quoted more often than almost any line in the play, usually to rebuke a sceptic. This piece puts it back in its scene, asks what "philosophy" meant in 1600 and why the two earliest good texts disagree about whose philosophy it is, reads Horatio as the man the line is aimed at, and follows the thought back to Plato, who had a name for the kind of thing the Ghost is.

    Philosophy
  5. Feature

    Socrates Comes Home From Potidaea

    Plato’s *Charmides* begins with a soldier back from a siege walking into a wrestling school and being asked who died. The siege was Potidaea, one of the sparks of the Peloponnesian War, and following that first sentence outward, into the history it names and the futures of the men in the room, changes how the conversation about self-restraint that follows should be read.

    Philosophy
  6. Research Note

    Reading Plato's Euthyphro: What a Failed Definition Teaches

    Plato's short dialogue on piety tries five times to say what holiness is and ends with one speaker hurrying away and no answer on the table. This introduction explains the situation that gives the conversation its edge, walks through the one argument everyone remembers, and suggests what a reader should watch for in a dialogue built to fail.

    Philosophy
  7. Research Note

    The Shoeless Philosopher

    A reflection on Diotima's portrait of Love in Plato's *Symposium*, where the philosopher turns out to be the one who knows he lacks wisdom and wants it anyway.

    Philosophy
  9. Dialectic

    Plato’s Sixth Definition of the Sophist

    In Sophist 230B–231E, the Stranger describes a “noble” form of sophistry that resembles Socratic questioning: it exposes false confidence and clears the soul for learning. Yet Plato distinguishes this purifying refutation from combative questioning that merely imitates wisdom or seeks victory in argument.

    Philosophy#TheSophist#AuxiliaryGuardians
  10. Photos

    Theaetetus (176E-177B)

    Socrates argues that wrongdoing carries an unavoidable penalty not reducible to scourging or death: unjust people assimilate themselves to the godless and wretched pattern of life rather than to the blessed divine one. In his account, foolishness prevents such people from recognizing that their unrighteous acts make them resemble the worse of these two patterns, so their punishment consists in living among evils and people like themselves and, unless they abandon their unscrupulous “cleverness,” being excluded after death from the blessed place that is pure of evil. Socrates adds that they initially dismiss this warning as foolish talk, yet when compelled to defend their doctrines in sustained personal argument rather than escape through rhetorical maneuvering, they eventually become dissatisfied with themselves, their eloquence withers, and they appear no better than children. He then identifies this line of thought as a digression and begins to turn back to the main argument, which continues beyond the visible page.

    Philosophy#Wrongdoingandpunishment#Theaetetus
  11. Photos

    The Sophist (216C-217E)

    The distinction among sophist, statesman, and philosopher is posed as a threefold classification whose members, the Stranger maintains, are difficult to define clearly. Socrates first portrays genuine philosophers as assuming many apparent forms because most people fail to recognize them: as they observe life in different cities, they may be judged worthless or supremely valuable and may be mistaken for statesmen, sophists, or even madmen. He therefore asks whether the Stranger’s country treats these three names as designating one, two, or three classes; the Stranger answers that they are three, while stressing that determining the nature of each is no small or easy task. When Theodorus notes that the question resembles one previously put to the Stranger, Socrates asks whether he prefers a continuous exposition or a question-and-answer exchange, recalling Parmenides’ use of the latter method. The Stranger says dialogue is easier with a cooperative interlocutor but otherwise favors an uninterrupted speech, and Socrates invites him to choose the young Theaetetus or another participant. Although initially embarrassed to deliver a long address on his first visit, the Stranger indicates that the subject cannot be handled through brief replies and will require an extended speech.

    Philosophy#TheSophist#HierarchyofBeing