Greek philosophy
Who was Heraclitus of Ephesus?
The "Obscure" philosopher who refused politics and wrote deliberately in a difficult way, and who defended fire as the principle of everything.
Philosophy and psychology
The Triple Dimension of the Human Being
Body, psyche and spirit, and why it is always the spirit that decides, even when the body and mind can no longer take it.
Philosophy and psychology
What is Self-Transcendence
The most fascinating secret in Frankl's map, man only realizes himself when he leaves himself.
Philosophy and psychology
Existential Tension: Why It Is Not Neurosis
Restlessness is not an illness, it is a vital force, a bow that needs to be tensioned to shoot the arrow of achievement.
Philosophy and psychology
The Three Psychological Phases in Concentration Camps
Shock, apathy and the difficult return to freedom, the three phases that Viktor Frankl observed in concentration camp prisoners.
Etymology and culture
Where does the word sadism come from?
The word comes from the name of the Marquis de Sade and became, a century later, a term in clinical psychopathology.
Philosophy and psychology
Freud, Adler and Frankl: pleasure, power or meaning?
The three Viennese schools of psychotherapy, each with a different answer to what moves human beings.
Philosophy and psychology
What is Logotherapy
The third Viennese school of psychotherapy, created by Viktor Frankl from the Greek word logos, meaning.
Philosophy and psychology
What is Noogenesis
Frankl's term for disorders that arise not from unconscious conflict but from meaninglessness.
Philosophy and psychology
What is Clinical Sadism
A personality disorder, not a figure of speech, is what Viktor Frankl saw in certain concentration camp guards.
Philosophy and psychology
The Four Types of Lies
From the harmless social lie to the ontological lie, which denies who you really are.
Philosophy and psychology
In Search of Meaning, by Viktor Frankl
How a psychiatrist survived four Nazi concentration camps and discovered, in the midst of horror, that the true engine of the soul is meaning.
Philosophy
The Dichotomy of Control, by Epictetus
Stoic Epictetus' rule of thumb for getting through any affliction without falling apart, separating what depends on you from what doesn't.
Philosophy
What is Stoicism
The school founded in a portico in Athens that taught half the world how to go through pain without collapsing, from Zeno of Citius to Marcus Aurelius.
Philosophy and theology
What is the Meaning of Life?
Four answers to the most serious question of all, from the Stoic portico to Frankl's logotherapy, and why only one of them doesn't depend solely on your willpower.
Philosophy
Where does “those who have a reason to live” come from?
The phrase was born with Nietzsche and became Viktor Frankl's motto in the concentration camps. How a 19th century aphorism became a clinical discovery in the 20th century.
Art and Renaissance
The Pietà, by Michelangelo
The only work Michelangelo signed, sculpted at age 23, and the reason why Mary's face is that of a young girl, not that of a grieving mother.
Art and Renaissance
Bernini and inspiration from Michelangelo
Bernini was obsessed with Michelangelo. He inherited the idea of freeing the figure trapped in marble and took it further, to pure movement.
Art and Renaissance
Sistine Chapel, what to see
A quick guide to the ceiling and altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, and what changes when recognizing the Divine Comedy behind the Last Judgment.
Art and Renaissance
Caravaggio and inspiration from Michelangelo
Michelangelo said that beauty can disturb. Caravaggio radicalized the lesson and said that ugliness can be sacred.
Art and Renaissance
Michelangelo and Dante's Divine Comedy
Why the Last Judgment was not created from scratch, it was read first, in the Divine Comedy that Michelangelo knew by heart.
Art and Renaissance
The Last Judgment, by Michelangelo
The painting that brought Pope Paul III to his knees, and Michelangelo's elegant revenge on the critic who complained about the nudes.
Art and Renaissance
Moses, by Michelangelo
Why Michelangelo's most intimidating sculpture has horns on its forehead, and what it says about the weight of knowing what others don't.
Art and Renaissance
Who was Michelangelo?
The sculptor and painter who lived 88 years at war with the Pope, with death and with himself, and proved that greatness is born from conflict that cannot be abandoned.
Art and Renaissance
Caravaggio and his works of David
Caravaggio returned to the theme of David and Goliath three times throughout his career. The differences between the versions tell the story of a painter who changed.
Art and Renaissance
Capitoline and Caravaggio Museums
Saint John the Baptist and The Gypsy Soothsayer, by Caravaggio, at the Pinacoteca Capitolina, inside the Capitoline Museums in Rome.
Art and Renaissance
Caravaggio and the Bible
Why Caravaggio, almost always painting biblical themes, treated them as reports of common people, not as a repository of idealized truths.
Art and Renaissance
Caravaggio and the Vocation of Saint Matthew
The painting in which Christ points to a tax collector, and grace falls on the last man anyone would expect God to choose.
Art and Renaissance
Caravaggio and Bernini, the birth of Baroque
How Caravaggio's pictorial drama became, in Bernini's hands, a drama carved in marble and projected into space.
Art and Renaissance
Galleria Borghese and Caravaggio
Caravaggio's six paintings gathered in the Galleria Borghese, the largest concentration of his work in a single museum in the world.