Greek philosophy
5 Lessons from Plato's Allegory of the Cave
The cave is almost always told only up to the exit. The lessons that change something are in what Plato writes right after, and they fit into five ideas.
Intellectual Life
Returning to the Cave Without Giving Up Your Refuge
Plato tells the one who has left the cave to go back into it. What this does not ask is that you give up your reading time. What it asks is much smaller, and much harder.
Greek philosophy
Plato on Education: After the Allegory of the Cave
The cave is almost always told only up to the climb out. Plato's most practical line about studying comes right after it, and it changes what education means.
Intellectual Life
Does Reading Many Books Help? What Plato Would Say
You read a lot and stay in the same place. Plato does not tell you to read less: he says the eye already sees, and the problem is where it points.
Intellectual Life
A Hard Book to Read: When Discomfort Helps
You read the same page three times and conclude the book is not for you. In Plato's cave, every time the prisoner moves forward, the text describes pain.
Philosophy and theology
Metanoia: The Biblical Meaning and Plato's Turn
Metanoia is usually translated as repentance. The Greek says more: a change of mind, of way of perceiving. And Plato has a similar turn, with a decisive difference.
Literature and philosophy
The Moral of Sisyphus: A Metaphor for Modern Life
If your days are all the same, why do you keep going? Two morals for the myth, the Greeks' and Camus's, and the factory worker whom Camus puts in Sisyphus's place.
Literature and philosophy
What Was Sisyphus's Crime? The Man Who Cheated Death
Everyone knows the stone, but almost no one tells what Sisyphus did. Aegina, a spring of water, Death in chains, and a request to his wife.
Literature and philosophy
Without God, Is Everything Permitted? Camus's Answer
Ivan Karamazov's line is usually read as a license to do whatever you want. Camus cites it at the start of "The Absurd Man" and shuts that door, with a mother getting through the small hours and a libertine who has also decided once and for all.
Art and the Renaissance
Titian's Sisyphus: The Painting That Shows the Burden
You don't see the man, you see the burden. Titian's painting in the Prado depicts the climb, and Camus writes about the descent.
Literature and philosophy
One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy: The Full Sentence
The line that became a caption and a mug has a companion almost no one quotes, and Camus's discovery comes before both of them. The hour of the descent, and the other Sisyphus, Ovid's.
Literature and philosophy
The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus: Summary and Where to Start
You opened the book and put it down halfway. The problem wasn't you, it was the door you came in through. Camus's argument in order, and the reading route that unlocks it.
Literature and philosophy
Philosophical Suicide in Camus: What About Faith?
The name startles, and the objection from people of faith comes right away: so is my faith an escape? Here is what Camus calls philosophical suicide, why he chose that word, and what criterion decides it.
Philosophy and theology
What Augustine didn't find in the books of the Platonists
Before converting, Augustine read the books of the Platonists, and found the Word there. What was missing is the same question Plato had left open.
Greek philosophy
The sun analogy: Plato's Good is beyond being
Plato compares the Good to the sun, which not only lets us see but makes things grow. And then he goes further: this principle is beyond being itself.
Intellectual life
Can I understand philosophy without a degree?
You read, you understand, you keep up, and still feel like something's missing a stamp. Plato, through a boy with no authorization, answers that.
Greek philosophy
Doxa and episteme: why being right isn't knowing
You can get directions right without knowing why, and get lost at the first fork. Plato calls that doxa. The difference from real knowledge isn't being right.
Greek philosophy
Recollection in Plato: recognizing what you never saw
Most guides stop at "the soul saw the Forms before birth." What's missing is the argument: why you already have a measure the world never gave you.
Greek philosophy
Plato's Phaedo: three passages to read first
The Phaedo has a heavyweight reputation, with four technical arguments about the soul. Three passages are enough as an entry point, and they are the ones behind the Theory of Forms.
Greek philosophy
Plato's second sailing: the method of the Forms
Before any thesis about the world of ideas, there is a method. Plato calls it the second sailing. When the wind dies and the sail no longer serves, you take up the oars.
Greek philosophy
Plato's Theory of Forms: the measure no one gave you
Two white cats, lying side by side. Where does the equality you see between them come from, if the world never gave you that measure? The question behind the Theory of Forms.
Intellectual life
To read is not to agree: the hardest Odyssey passage
After killing the suitors, Telemachus hangs twelve slave women from the house, and Homer does not comment on the act. What that scene teaches about reading a classic.
Art and Renaissance
Primaticcio painted the end of the Odyssey as a talk
No sword, no throne: Primaticcio chooses to paint Ulysses and Penelope lying down, in profile, in low light, on the night they tell each other about twenty years apart.
Art and Renaissance
In Turner's painting, the giant is barely there
Turner paints the exact instant when Ulysses shouts his own name back at the blinded Cyclops. And hides the giant in a shadow, to leave the whole canvas to the light.
Applied Philosophy
Gryllus, by Plutarch: the pig who refused to return
Circe turns Odysseus' men into pigs with their minds intact. Eight hundred years later, Plutarch imagined one of them refusing to become human again, and the argument still stings.
Applied Philosophy
In the Odyssey, the mentor never solves it for you
When you say someone was your mentor, you are quoting the Odyssey without knowing it. But the episode teaches more than etymology: it teaches what real help looks like.
Applied Philosophy
Starting over after losing everything: the Odyssey answers
Faced with the "now you just start over" that everyone says, the Odyssey answers hard and generous at once: it takes time, it hurts, and still you can start over, mature, from zero.
Applied Philosophy
Métis: the intelligence of Odysseus is not cunning
Achilles teaches you how to die well. Odysseus teaches you how to return. The word behind that difference is métis, and it does not mean what "cunning" suggests in English.
Applied Philosophy
The Sirens in the Odyssey: what they really promise
It is not seduction by beauty: the Sirens offer to know everything that happened at Troy and everything on earth. And Ulysses, knowing he would not resist, ties himself up first.
Great books and literature
Argos, Odysseus's dog
Before his wife, before his father, the one who recognizes disguised Odysseus is his own dog, old and abandoned on a dung heap, waiting for twenty years.