A well-educated person is not someone with a set of credentials that will help them live a materially wealthy and comfortable life, but someone who is spiritually free to know and delight in those goods that make a human life deeply and truly happy.
The techniques of persuasion have been so habitually separated from logic and wisdom, it’s assumed that rhetoric is persuasion through bad reasons for bad purposes. But in truth, the art of persuasion is as necessary for good arguments as it is for bad ones.
Cicero’s formulation of ethics was a major influence on minds as diverse as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Locke, Voltaire, and Thomas Jefferson. Perhaps we would do wisely to return to a fountain that has watered so many so well.
The paradoxes in how gravity, light, and atomic nuclear forces operate have prompted subtle theories about not only nature, but reality as such—bending science back towards its parent discipline of philosophy.
“All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.” — Alexander Woollcott
Like Tennessee Williams’ Tom Wingfield, Aesop gives us “truth cleverly disguised as fiction,” conveying wisdom imaginatively and indirectly.
Walker Percy said “You can get all A’s and flunk at life.” This is an ideal time to refocus on what winning at life means.
From Socrates to Descartes, dialectic was principally a technique of the mind to discover truth: Hegel suggested that the world itself is a kind of mind.
Not every individual lesson takes us through Plato’s whole “divided line,” but each orients us toward the next stage, moving from images to Forms.
Is aristocracy good or bad? What about monarchy or democracy? Do we even need to commit to a single form of government?
