Etymology and culture
What is paideia?
The Greek concept that gives its name to the integral formation of the human being, and that Plutarch teaches begins not with speech, but with the ear.
Greek philosophy
Why is listening more difficult than speaking?
Talking feels like the active part of the conversation. Plutarch explains why it is just the opposite, and why listening well requires more effort from the mind than speaking.
Greek philosophy
Why should you listen before speaking?
The advice Plutarch gave young Nicandro was not "speak well." It was “listen first.” Because this order, and not the opposite, is the beginning of all formation.
Greek philosophy
Who was Plutarch?
The Greek biographer who was also a priest at the oracle at Delphi, and who left, alongside Parallel Lives, a collection of treatises on practical life.
Art and Renaissance
Raphael and Michelangelo, rivalry or admiration?
One was harmony, the other strength. How the rivalry between Raphael and Michelangelo, in the Rome of the Popes, produced some of the greatest works in the history of art.
Art and Renaissance
What is Raphael's School of Athens?
Pagan philosophers painted in the Pope's private rooms. Why the School of Athens is a political manifesto, not just a tribute to Ancient Greece.
Art and Renaissance
Who was Rafael Sanzio?
The painter from Urbino who arrived at the Vatican at age 25 and died at 37, after creating the image that defined how the Christian Renaissance saw itself.
Literature
Why the book is controversial
Loved and forbidden at the same time: the reasons why The Catcher in the Rye is one of the most censored books, and the shadow that followed it.
Literature
The ducks in Central Park
Holden insists on a silly question: where do the ducks in Central Park go when the lake freezes? Underneath it is the fear of disappearing.
Literature
Who is Holden Caulfield
The narrator of The Catcher in the Rye: sixteen years old, expelled from school, mourning his brother and at war with the falsehood of the adult world.
Literature
The meaning of the title
The title comes from a verse by Robert Burns that Holden barely remembers, and from the fantasy that gives the book its name: being the one who catches the children before they fall off the cliff.
Literature
The Catcher in the Rye
Three days in the life of Holden Caulfield after being expelled from high school. Salinger's novel about adolescence, grief and the refusal of adult falsehood.
Philosophy and theology
Evil as the absence of good
If God is good and created everything, where does evil come from? Saint Augustine's answer that breaks with Manichaeism: evil is not a substance, it is a deprivation.
Philosophy
What is time, according to Saint Augustine
If no one asks me, I know; If I want to explain, I don't know. Saint Augustine's famous meditation on time, eternity and the soul that measures.
Philosophy and theology
The robbery of the pears
Why does Saint Augustine dedicate pages to a banal theft of pears as a teenager? Because there he finds the enigma of sin: loving evil just for the sake of loving it.
Church History
Saint Augustine's conversion (tolle, lege)
In the Milan garden, a child's voice repeats, pick up and read. Saint Augustine opens Saint Paul's letters, and the life he already understood but did not live finally turns around.
Philosophy and theology
Confessions, by Saint Augustine
The first great autobiography of the West, read as a mirror for the reader: from the theft of pears to the conversion in the garden, from evil to time and memory.
Quotes
Living the questions, by Rilke
Rilke's phrase in Letters to a Young Poet: love your own questions like closed rooms, and live everything, until the answers mature.
Latin and tradition
Veritas is adequate
The classic definition of truth, from Aristotle to Saint Thomas Aquinas: the adequacy between the mind and reality. And because the truth is discovered, it is not invented.
Philosophy
Plato's dialogue Meno
Meno arrives sure he knows. Socrates asks what virtue is, and the dialogue becomes a lesson on the difference between examples and definition.
Philosophy
What is Socrates' maieutics?
The art of midwifery applied to ideas: the method with which Socrates gave birth, through question, to the truth that was already within the other.
Philosophy
What is the philosophical attitude?
Curiosity, questioning and the search for truth: the three dimensions of the philosophical attitude, and the enemy that destroys it from within.
Philosophy and theology
What is the Logos?
In the beginning was the Logos: so opens the Gospel of John. What Logos means and why it grounds truth and the intelligibility of the world.
Philosophy and theology
Truth, goodness and beauty: the transcendentals
The classical tradition called truth, goodness and beauty transcendentals: three faces of one reality, being itself. What this means.
Philosophy and theology
The principle of non-contradiction
One and the same thing cannot be and not be at the same time, under the same aspect. What the principle of non-contradiction is and why no one escapes it.
Philosophy and theology
What is relativism?
’Everyone has their own truth’ sounds humble, but contradicts itself. What relativism is and why ’everything is relative’ undoes itself from within.
Philosophy and theology
Truth as coherence
The coherence theory: a statement is true when it fits without contradiction into a system. An excellent test, but why it is not enough.
Philosophy and theology
What is alétheia?
Alétheia is the Greek word for truth: a-létheia, un-concealment. Truth as unveiling, lifting the veil and letting reality appear.
Philosophy and theology
What is truth?
What is truth? The classical answer in three steps: correspondence with the real, the test of coherence, and the truth that has a face.
Literature and philosophy
One, None and One Hundred Thousand and identity
In Pirandello, Vitangelo Moscarda discovers that he is not one, but a hundred thousand. The parallel with Don Quixote and the question about who we are to others.