Greek philosophy
From myth to logos: what changed
The passage is often told as a divorce between reason and religion. It wasn't. It was a change in the type of response that was demanded from the world.
Greek philosophy
What is Anaximander's Apeiron?
Thales' disciple disagreed with the master with an argument, and reasoned to a principle that no one had ever seen. The first abstract concept of the West is born.
Greek philosophy
What is Arché?
The word that the pre-Socratics hunted brings together three meanings that the Greeks heard together, and no single translation accounts for it.
Greek philosophy
Why philosophy was born in Miletus
A rich port, without priests who own the truth, and full of competing myths. The three conditions that gave rise to the first philosophical question.
Greek philosophy
Who was Thales of Miletus?
The first to answer the question at the beginning of everything. He said it was the water, and he was wrong. But the reasoning behind the answer is what makes him the first philosopher.
Greek philosophy
Who were the pre-Socratics
Three men from one city, in three generations, traded "what god did this?" for "what principle sustains this?", and founded Western philosophy.
Literature and politics
The fable, from Aesop and Phaedrus to Orwell
Twenty-five centuries separate Aesop from Orwell, but the genre is the same: using animals to say about power what no human would say out loud.
Philosophy
What is Newspeak?
If a word does not exist, the thought it named also ceases to exist. The language that Orwell imagined to kill criticism in the bud.
History of ideas
Animal Farm and the Russian Revolution
From 1917 until the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, every chapter of Soviet history has its exact counterpart on Orwell's farm.
Literature and politics
"Some are more equal than others": the meaning
The sentence that closes Animal Farm is not a grammatical error. It is the exact formula for how an ideal empties itself inside, without ever being abolished.
History of ideas
Gramsci and cultural hegemony
Why did Gramsci say that in Europe the revolution is not made through class struggle, but through culture. And how this changed Latin American politics.
Philosophy
What is doublethink?
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. The concept that Orwell created to name the mind that accepts what it knows to be false.
Authors
Who was George Orwell?
Born in India, trained by the British imperial police, socialist who never forgave Stalinism. The life behind Animal Farm and 1984.
History of ideas
1984 vs. Brave New World: the road from Utopia
More dreamed of the ideal island. Orwell showed control through fear. Huxley, control through pleasure. Three books, one warning about lost vigilance.
Literature and politics
Animal Farm, by George Orwell: summary and analysis
A farm, a revolution and a phrase that sums up the betrayal of every ideal: "some are more equal than others". Orwell's fable, explained.
Literature and politics
The characters in Animal Farm and who they represent
Napoleon is Stalin, Snowball is Trotsky, old Major is Marx. The complete map of the historical allegory behind each farm animal.
Quotes
Quotes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
From "Et tu, Brute?" to the "noblest Roman of all": the phrases that remained from the tragedy, translated and with their context in the play.
History and literature
Is "Et tu, Brute" historical?
The phrase that everyone knows does not appear in ancient sources. What Suetonius and Plutarch really tell about Caesar's death, and what is fiction.
Cultural trips
The Temple of Divine Julius in Rome
In the Roman Forum, over the place where Caesar's body was cremated, fresh flowers still appear two thousand years later. The myth that conquered death.
Cultural trips
Where Caesar died, in Rome
It wasn't in the Capitol of legend. Caesar fell into Pompey's Curia, now below street level and inhabited by cats, in the heart of Rome.
Philosophy and logic
Mark Antony's speech
Friends, Romans, compatriots. How Antony destroys Brutus using his own words, and why emotion overcame reason before the people.
Greek philosophy
What is hubris in tragedy
The excess that precedes the fall. The Greek concept of hybris is the first warning of the tragedy, when Caesar begins to speak about himself in the third person.
Philosophy
What is preventive tyrannicide
Killing to stop an evil that does not yet exist. The ethical dilemma that sustains Julius Caesar and did not die in 44 BC.
Philosophy
The Stoics, suicide and freedom
Every slave has in his own hands the power to extirpate his captivity. How the Stoics viewed voluntary death, and what this decides in Caesar's tragedy.
History and literature
Who was Julius Caesar
The historical man behind the play: the general-turned-god whose death did not save the Republic but founded the Empire the conspirators feared.
Comparative literature
The three traitors chewed by Lucifer
In the ninth circle of Hell, Lucifer has three mouths and in each one he crushes a traitor. Why Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, and Shakespeare's opposite verdict.
Philosophy
Stoicism and Epicureanism: the difference
One seeks virtue; the other, the absence of disturbance. The two great schools of good life in Antiquity, and what separates one from the other in practice.
Literature and politics
Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare: summary and analysis
The play does not tell the fall of a tyrant, but the crime of honorable men who kill for an ideal. The question she leaves without an easy answer.
Literature and philosophy
Existential anguish and loneliness in The Little Prince
The desert that opens the work is a spiritual desert. How the Little Prince goes through loneliness and anguish with Kierkegaard and Camus in the background.
Literature and philosophy
Instrumental rationality in The Little Prince
The businessman who has stars and the geographer who has never seen an ocean: how the work criticizes the reason that only knows how to measure, count and possess.