Great books and literature
Nobody is my name: Odysseus and the Cyclops
To survive inside the cave of Polyphemus, Odysseus gives up his own name. Then, once safe, he shouts it back, and the Odyssey makes him pay the price.
Great books and literature
Which Portuguese translation of the Odyssey to read?
Two editions, two different jobs: one is for reading, the other is the one the house uses to check every quote. Here is which is which, and why.
Literature and philosophy
Odysseus and Calypso: the seven years of Canto V
The common reading sees correctly what it sees: seven years on an island, far from home. Canto V, read verse by verse, shows what it still has not seen.
Literature and philosophy
Penelope and the test of the bed, in the Odyssey
The son already recognized him. The nurse, by a scar. The dog, by scent. She does not move, and puts her husband through the one test he cannot pass by force.
Greek philosophy
Socrates' daimonion never commanded, only restrained
Socrates said he heard, since childhood, an inner sign. It is almost always told wrong. The daimonion never gave orders. It only stopped him.
Literature and philosophy
The Odyssey, by Homer: summary and analysis
It is not the record of a journey: it is the story of a man stripped, one by one, of his name, his lineage, his land and his past. The summary follows the exact order in which Homer gives the four pieces back.
Greek philosophy
Holy Socrates, pray for us: what Erasmus meant
A character created by Erasmus, facing the death of Socrates, says "Holy Socrates, pray for us." It is not canonization. It is a 16th-century humanist recognizing a kinship.
History of Ideas and Civilization
Socrates and the Invention of the Soul
Before Socrates, the psyché was only the breath that leaves the body at death. With him, the word comes to name the part of you that thinks, decides, and responds to treatment. That is where the care of the soul is born.
Great Books and Literature
Crito: why Socrates didn't escape
The escape was ready, paid for, and arranged with the guards. Socrates argued with his friend until the end over whether escaping would be just, and stayed.
History of Ideas and Civilization
Why Socrates was condemned: Athens' side
The two charges against Socrates, and the city that brought them: fresh from a lost war and a bloody tyranny, watching a man prove, in public, that its own certainties did not hold up.
Great Books and Literature
Apology of Socrates: not calendar wisdom
The text is short, reads in an afternoon, and the line everyone quotes usually arrives without the court, the sentence, and the seventy-year-old man who said it.
Intellectual life
Why What You Discover Alone Sticks
Whoever is convinced by a good speech changes their mind for as long as the impression lasts. Whoever reaches a discovery alone has nowhere to go back to. Socrates already knew why.
Applied Philosophy
For Socrates, being good isn't willpower
Socrates' most contested thesis: virtue is knowledge. No one errs on purpose, and whoever truly sees the good wants it. See also the objection Aristotle raised against it.
Greek philosophy
Socratic questions: the method, not the list
The lists circulating out there are modern teaching taxonomies. What Socrates practiced was something else, an entire way of conducting the conversation.
Greek philosophy
Know thyself: the Socratic method
The Delphi inscription existed before Socrates was born, and it meant something else. He turned it into a method nobody practices alone.
Greek philosophy
I know that I know nothing: what Socrates said
It's the most famous line in philosophy, and it caught on for good reason. What Socrates actually says in the Apology, 21d, is narrower, and useful for much more.
Literature and life
How to read a play without getting stuck
If you open a play and get stuck on the headings and who is speaking, the problem is not you. It's the format. See the method to unlock reading.
History of Ideas and Civilization
Purgatory in England in 1601
The England that saw Hamlet's premiere had been Protestant for more than sixty years, and the Reformation had abolished purgatory. A ghost that comes from there was technically a forbidden ghost.
Literature and philosophy
Ophelia, the Only One Who Truly Goes Mad
The most reproduced painting in the English language depicts a scene that the play never stages. And that is exactly what happened to Ofélia from beginning to end, a suffering that no one sees up close.
Literature and philosophy
Hamlet, by Shakespeare: summary and analysis
He is not the indecisive one: he is the only character on the scene who calculated the price of acting. The summary that follows the play act by act and explains why the sword does not come down.
Literature and philosophy
Hamlet's Ghost: Purgatory or Hell?
The question that organizes the entire play is not whether Hamlet will take revenge. That's where that voice from under the stage came from, and to obey it is to honor your father or fall into a trap.
Great Books and Literature
Paideia: formation is not instruction
For the Greeks, the point of everything was not to accumulate matter in a head. It was to form the entire human being. Werner Jaeger recovered this word in Paideia.
Literature and politics
Why Hamlet didn't inherit the throne
It's not a plot hole. The Denmark of the play chooses its king by council, and this changes everything that Claudius did, and what Hamlet would do if he killed the elected king.
Philosophy and theology
Why Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius by praying
The audience has just heard Claudius confess that prayer itself does not rise. Hamlet didn't listen. And therein lies the harshest irony of the play.
Applied Philosophy
Moral dilemma: when no way out is clean
The difference between the conflict of duties that is resolved and the genuine moral dilemma, in which any choice exacts a price. The name that philosophy gives to the impasse with no clean exit.
Greek philosophy
The truth left the temple and went to the square
In the temple, the word went from those who knew to those who listened. In the Greek square it began to be said between equals, and anyone who disagreed responded right there.
Applied Philosophy
Is doubting what I was taught a lack of faith?
Examining what tradition has taught you is not born against faith. It is born from the same capacity that Christian tradition calls the image of God in you.
Greek philosophy
The alphabet that made the argument checkable
Just over twenty signs, learned in weeks, against hundreds of signs and years of training. The technique that took the argument out of a caste's hands and put it to anyone's test.
Applied Philosophy
Thaumazein: the astonishment that won't settle
Everyone has been amazed at the world. Philosophy is not born from astonishment, it is born from astonishment that refuses to stop at the first answer that sounds good.
Great Books and Literature
The Greeks who died before Christ
Saint Justin, philosopher and martyr, answered a question that most people avoid, about the Greeks who thought righteously without ever hearing about Christ.