Recent close reading and teaching and Homer, along with some long standing interests leads me to reflect on the Homeric epics as a beginning in literature and a beginning in philosophy, which appears in later beginnings. It requires no argument to suggest that The Iliad and The Odyssey are foundational texts in the history of…

I've been watching a few episodes of the BBC drama series "Foyle's War."   Its a decent show, but what interests me right now is just an expression that the main character, Christopher Foyle, often uses that I had never heard before.   It works like this:  someone will ask him if he thinks that…

here.  (h/t Shelley Tremain)

Shawn Miller, a graduate student at the University of California, Davis, has been kind enough to create a philosophy of physics grad program wiki in the mold of philbio.net, which you can find at philphysics.net.   He wanted me to be sure to note that the wiki uses, with permission, Christian Wüthrich's Philosophers of Physics list from his Taking…

  Love is what is needed now, not further polarization.

Nothing new to say about Schmitt here, but I think there is something to be said for clarifying in what ways Schmitt is not ‘Schmittian’ in some senses that influence some people. This issue came up in a teaching context recently and I think refers to a widespread tendency, which I believe can be tackled…

There are some ways in which Kierkegaard might appear to be diminishing the importance of ethics. At least such is  the impression some take away from Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s most read text, and the one most readily found in relatively popular editions. Fear and Trembling features the well known idea of the ‘teleological suspension…

One aspect of Nietzsche’s political thought of note is the strong tendency to replace politics with culture as the source of value. Some sense of cultural value as the human goal, or at least a major aspect of flourishing humanity, or some flourishing group of humans, goes back to The Birth of Tragedy. However, at…

There is some exaggeration in referring to the death of Stoicism, of course its ethics (which is what concerns us here) is still of interest and has even had a revival, popular and academic in recent years. Nevertheless there really was a death of Stoicism in that the influence  it had from its Hellenistic and…

The idea of a republic has been very tied up from the beginning with the idea of loss, even when linked with the hope for a new beginning. The first great political text of republican political theory may be the Funeral Oration of Pericles as reported (invented?) by Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War, where the defence…