History of Philosophy Commons^™

Pagan Winter, Samm Willard

Sophia and Philosophia

Isn’t this a lovely place to pick apart your lover’s face
Some say the river bank’s a sacred place
Others think that’s such a silly thing to say
But I would never try to prove them wrong on such a blissful day
The colors of the leaves will soon have changed
The yellows and the greens will fade to gray
But I will lose a quiet hour to the darkest day
A pagan winter’s on its way
I will see the death of God before it’s Christmas day
A pagan winter’s on its way
Well isn’t this some lovely clay …

Haunted By A Memory I Never Lived, Carlos Hiraldo

Sophia and Philosophia

I am haunted by a memory I never lived. My mother and father are sitting in their house in Brooklyn with my baby sister watching the 1969 moon landing. Born in 1971, I wasn’t there. But I spent my toddler years in the waning residue of excitement about the landing and listening to adults talk about where they had watched it. As a child, I was baffled by how vivid this event that occurred without me was to people of my parents’ age. Except for some surviving pictures of the living room, I never knew the house in which they …

Call Thee Ishmael, Mark Backus

Sophia and Philosophia

“Moby-Dick is a strangely compelling book.”[1] Scholarship and commentary help the reader understand why Ishmael’s tale is so compelling, but not always why it is strangely so. The perennial search for a master key to unlock the strangeness of Moby-Dick beneath its infinite layers has added more mesmerizing layers, but if many of the proposed keys fit into the lock of Moby-Dick, why is there yet a sense that none have completely opened “the great flood-gates?” (Moby-Dick 22, hereafter “MD”). Is it because none of them are right, or that they are only partly right, or that …

Platonic Agonism: A Dialogical Addendum To Plato’S Sophist, Bennett Foster

Sophia and Philosophia

The following addendum to Plato’s Sophist was fabricated as a kind of experimental answer to a specific contextual question: What is the relation of Plato’s conception of philosophy to the practice of the agōn in Ancient Greece? For the “contest-system,”[1] to adopt Gouldner's phrase, has long been recognized as one of the salient features of Greek culture in the centuries leading up to Plato’s time.[2] Yet in the dialogues Plato never gives an explicit critique of the agōn the way he does other cultural phenomena, such as politics, poetry, rhetoric, education, etc. Many scholars have therefore concluded that Plato is …

Socratic Metaethics Imagined, Steve Ross, Lisa Warenski

Sophia and Philosophia

A time machine mysteriously appeared one day in ancient Athens. Curious about the future of philosophical dialogue, Socrates entered the device and traveled to the 21st Century. He spent several months in the United Kingdom and United States discussing metaethics before returning to Athens, now a devoted and formidable quasi-realist moral expressivist.

Platonism Of The Future, Patrick L. Miller

Sophia and Philosophia

Buying textbooks, writing syllabi, and putting on armor. This is how many students and teachers prepared to return to campus this past fall. The last few years have witnessed an intensifying war for the soul of the university, with many minor skirmishes, and several pitched battles. The most dramatic was last spring at Evergreen State, shortly before the end of the spring semester.[1] Perhaps the most dramatic since then has been at Reed College.[2] There is no shortage of examples, filling periodicals left and right. Wherever it next explodes, this war promises more ferocity, causing more casualties—careers, programs, ideals.

We Scholars, Mark Anderson

Sophia and Philosophia

As a graduate student in my late twenties, I began one winter to experience attacks of migraine fever while conducting research preliminary to the writing of my doctoral thesis. Long hours sitting alone in the basement rooms of university libraries, hunched over a creaking desk, chasing down references to obscure manuscripts, translating ancient languages from small-print editions of old books, copying extended extracts into my notes, formulating and recording my own insights and arguments—all this intellectual labor executed while hidden away from the sun drained me of the vigor I’d acquired as a child on walking tours with my father. …

The Rhetoric Of Tyranny: Callicles The Rhetor And Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Greg Whitlock

Sophia and Philosophia

Here I will work through the rhetoric of tyranny as practiced by Callicles and as reflected in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, in particular. In Part 2 it will be shown that Nietzsche’s account of Plato as the complex figure with a Socratic exterior but a latent alternative ego of the tyrant, arrived at an image consistent with E.R. Dodds’ later thesis. Callicles the rhetor, featured as a student of Gorgias, embodies this alter-ego. In Part 3 we find Callicles and Zarathustra shared very similar beliefs once they overcame shame and gained honesty. Indeed, Callicles expounded a number of propositions foundational to …

"Part Of That Force That Always Wills The Evil And Always Produces The Good" On A Devilish Incoherence, Peter Baumann

Sophia and Philosophia

When Mephisto was asked by Faust, "Well now, who are you then?" (“Nun gut, wer bist Du denn?”), he gave the well-known answer, "Part of that force that always wills the evil and always produces the good" (“Ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft”: Goethe, Faust, 1334-1336). This answer raises some important questions which in turn lead to interesting answers. Let us start by looking at the content of Mephisto's utterance.

The Problem Of Obviousness, Benjamin Goldberg

Sophia and Philosophia

1. The Problem of Obviousness
There’s no such thing as obviousness.

This isn’t, of course, itself obvious; nor is it clear why it should be a problem. So let me start elsewhere, with the anti-vaccine movement. A friend of mine laid out the ‘obvious’ position: there are facts and rationality on one side, unenlightened ignorance and bigotry on the other. Scientists versus fools, and the fools don’t even know what game is being played.

Poetic Justice: Apology Overdue, Stephen Faison

Sophia and Philosophia

Jurors of our republic, I do not know whether you were persuaded by the case made against me, but I certainly hope that you were not. Some of what the prosecutor told you is accurate, though much of it is untrue. To put it another way, some of his facts are correct, yet the conclusions he presented were usually misleading distortions and in some cases simply incorrect. If the indictment is clarified to its essentials, I am accused of corrupting the young and not believing in the gods in whom the city believes. I intend to show that these charges …

‘To Warm Our Hands’, Emmanuel O. Angulo

Sophia and Philosophia

Lovers often die shortly one after the other. Romeo and Juliet. June Carter and Johnny Cash. My grandfather and my grandmother. Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen.

Marianne was the inspiration, most famously, of Cohen’s song “So long, Marianne”, but also of “Bird on the wire” and poems from the collection Flowers for Hitler. Cohen’s last words for her reached her just two days before her death—and a few months before his own. They said: ‘you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don't need to say anything more about that because you know …

Cindy, Ken Clatterbaugh

Sophia and Philosophia

Cindy Norton sang loud in slightly accented Spanish. The song was “Perfidia” (“Wicked Woman”). She remembered the melody, and the Spanish language radio reminded her of the lyrics, although she could hardly hear the radio or herself above the grinding, popping, and rattling of her Volkswagen Rabbit. Her radio picked up only one station.

The Descent Of Winter: William Carlos Williams Under The Influence Of Paris, Phillip Barron

Sophia and Philosophia

The Descent of Winter, published in Ezra Pound’s magazine The Exile in 1928, is an uneven experiment in unclassifiable writing. Williams began writing the diaristic entries aboard the SS Pennland “in the fall of 1927. He was returning from Europe, where he had left Florence Williams with their two sons, who were to attend school in Geneva.” (Imaginations, 231) The slim book alternates between spare, image driven poems composed of short lines and diaristic prose. Most entries are titled only with the dates of their composition. In aesthetics, Williams always concerned himself with form. The variety of …

Keats, Truth, And Empathy, Peter Shum

Sophia and Philosophia

At one level, Keats’s sonnet entitled On Peace (1814) is full of philosophical certainties. The speaker believes, for example, that a nation’s people have a right to live in freedom under the rule of law, and that the rule of law should be applicable to everybody. Political and philosophical commitments of this kind do not seem to be called into question in this poem, or made the subject of an enquiry. On the contrary, it is as though we are confronted with somebody who, in certain central thematic respects at least, appears to know his own mind.

Avatars Of Oneself, Patrick L. Miller

Sophia and Philosophia

Zoe is an American woman who has found that “drawing the line and standing firm has always made me feel like a bitch, and, actually, I feel that people saw me as one too.”[3] For two years, however, she played an online role-playing game using a male character where “as a man I was liberated from all that.” She made mistakes in her unfamiliar role, but learned from them. “I got better at being firm but not rigid,” she says; “I practiced, safe from criticism.” Case is an American man, who plays a similar game but always appears as a …

Jane Austen Meets The Gps: Place And Space, David Kolb

Sophia and Philosophia

When one reads Jane Austen’s novels, one finds that her heroines’ lives center around a beloved and comfortable home, in a local region including a small town, some neighboring estates, and local hills and valleys. It is a detailed and textured home area of nearby places reachable on foot or horse. One to three miles are walkable to a friend’s house or a favorite scenic hill. Beyond this region is no longer “home.” Fifteen or twenty-five miles can be distant.

Nietzsche And Heraclitus: Notes On Stars Without An Atmosphere, Niketas Siniossoglou

Sophia and Philosophia

I awake estranged from everyone. Words have lost their meaning; they sound indifferent and homonymous. The word No appears to mean Yes, or rather: Yes and No are malleable, ephemeral, and transparent. A decades-old or perhaps centuries-old movement of miry clay has resulted in a miscarriage of words. Iinquire whether anyone still holds the resources needed for a direct, sincere affirmation of life—a Yes that is definitively and essentially affirmative—or a No that is definitively and essentially negative—words bursting forth splendour like a crystal. I am told that formulations of this sort are incomprehensible; they are too metaphorical and, …

On The Relationship Of Alcibiades’ Speech To The Rest Of The Speeches In Plato’S Symposium[1], Andy Davis

Sophia and Philosophia

To get to the point immediately concerning how I think about the relationship between the first five speeches and Socrates’ speech: it seems to me the claim that Plato has only brought together inadequate perspectives on Eros in order to present Socrates’ speech over and against them as the only correct one is completely in error. Socrates himself does not deny these speeches their accolades, he comes back to many things in them as he assigns each single perspective its own due place. Much more, I believe that from the first speech to the last a decisive progress takes place, …

Kirkos, Prabhu Venkatarama

Sophia and Philosophia

Yesterday morning I received a newspaper clipping that changed the course of my life. It arrived in a small grey envelope, my mother’s Cyrillic handwriting on the front instantly recognizable by its beautiful loops and arches. I was expecting it; my mother had told me it was in the mail. The clipping was of an obituary, that of Robert Mascas, a younger cousin of mine who’d lived in my former hometown of Kirkos. He had turned eighteen three months ago, precisely seven years to the day after I had. The obituary didn’t mention what my mother had on the phone, …

Xanthippe To Her Mother, Ginger Osborn

Sophia and Philosophia

The following is a translation of an ancient manuscript, presumably a late-Hellenistic school exercise, recovered from the so-called Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, which was entombed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 BCE. The library was well-stocked with philosophical works, mostly of an Epicurean bent, but with a variety of other traditions represented as well. The text below is the result of the editorial work and translation of the Italo-Brtitish philosophical eccentric Michael Tommasi, completed presumably in Cambridge in the 1940s, but never published; his literary executors discovered the manuscript among his posthumous papers. Several revisions to Tommasi's …

Review Of Swimming Home, By Vincent Katz, Phillip Barron

Sophia and Philosophia

After a reading in San Francisco, I asked Katz about the significance of using the term “poetry” repeatedly throughout “Sidewalk Poem.” He answered, “poetry is about making, as much as any hand skill like carpentry or welding, but the craft of poetry is not respected.” For Charles Reznikoff and Federico Garcia Lorca, walking the streets of New York was integral to the act of writing poetry. The craft of poetry contains not only those moments when pen smears ink on paper or keyboard presses pixel on screen. Making poetry is more sensuous and active than the still, quiet moments that …

Nietzsche's Views On Plato Pre-Basel, Daniel Blue

Sophia and Philosophia

In an essay published in 2004[1] Thomas Brobjer surveyed Nietzsche’s attitudes toward Plato and argued that, far from entering into a dedicated agon with that philosopher, he had little personal engagement with Plato’s views at all. Certainly, he did not grapple so immediately and fruitfully with him as he did with Emerson, Schopenhauer, Lange, and even Socrates. Instead, he merely “set up a caricature of Plato as a representative of the metaphysical tradition … to which he opposed his own.”[2] This hardly reflects the view of Nietzsche scholarship in general, but Brobjer argued his case vigorously by ranging broadly over …

Empty Souls: Confession And Forgiveness In Hegel And Dostoevsky, Ryan Johnson

Sophia and Philosophia

“Towards the end of a sultry afternoon early in July a young man came out of his little room in Stolyarny Lane and turned and in the direction of Kameny Bridge in central St. Petersburg.”[1] Right then, this young man, a former law student named Rodion Raskolnikov, is caught in an agonizing conversation with himself over whether or not to commit the ultimate crime: to murder an innocent person. Exasperated, wondering what to do with such a weighty decision, he cried aloud, “that’s why I don’t act, because I am always talking. Or perhaps I talk so much just because …