As the legend goes, the first time Hercules faced the Hydra, he despaired when he discovered that cutting off one of its heads meant that two would grow back in its place. He would never be able to kill the beast if it got stronger...
Virtue ethics’ weaknesses are twofold. At one extreme, in Asia, the Confucian emphasis on family as the building block of community, society, and polity can lead – and has led – to corruption and favoritism in the form of nepotism and related vices. At another extreme, where...
In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.” “Nonsense,”...
When you have gathered enough knowledge and you throw it, then ignorance is attained. Then you really become ignorant - like Socrates who can say: I know only one thing, that I don't know anything. This knowledge, or this ignorance - you can call it whatever you...
But since "neither," to use the words of Euripides, "do all troubles proceed only from old age," nor from the stupidity of our friends, we ought to observe not only the shortcomings but also the good points of our friends, aye, by Zeus, and to be...
Dear Marguerite, You’re itching to be on your own. You don’t want anybody telling you what time you have to be in at night or how to raise your baby. You’re going to leave your mother’s big comfortable house and she won’t stop you, because she...
! If one investigates this question of why making a show of being clever should be considered stupid, the first answer that comes to mind is one that seems to have the dust of ancestral furniture about it, for it maintains that appearing not to be cle~er...
ALL that a man achieves and all that he fails to achieve is the direct result of his own thoughts. In a justly ordered universe, where loss of equipoise would mean total destruction, individual responsibility must be absolute. A man’s weakness and strength, purity and...
Most of the everyday discomforts of adult life are not only transient but also useful. The pangs of hunger prompt you to eat. The crankiness of inadequate sleep pushes you to get to bed. The prick of a thorn makes you pull back your finger,...
Spinoza wrote in Latin, adopting medieval and Cartesian technicalities, and forging his own style, which was sparse and unadorned, yet solemn and imposing. The occasional aphorisms jump from the page with all the greater force, in that they emerge from arguments presented with mathematical exactitude....
