Aesop: Wisdom From Below
Like Tennessee Williams’ Tom Wingfield, Aesop gives us “truth cleverly disguised as fiction,” conveying wisdom imaginatively and indirectly.
Great Works & Authors
The Great Conversation: Prophecy
The secrets of the past, the present, the future, and the transcendental all appeal to the insatiable human mind. The prophet claims to access them.
The Great Conversation: Mathematics
God himself is regularly described and depicted in art as the supreme geometer, creating all things in number, weight, and measure.
The Great Conversation: Dialectic
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.
Teresa: The Homeliness of Mysticism
It is easy to think of St. Teresa’s ecstasies and visions as alien to our experience — yet her mysticism was shrewd and earthy, not abstract.
How We Learn: The Divided Line in Plato’s “Republic”
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.
Copernicus: The Brilliance of Beauty
Copernicus did not set out to found modern science. He did not foresee the internal combustion engine or the Hubble Space Telescope. He did not even set out to revolutionize astronomy. He studied the stars because they were interesting.
The Great Conversation: Wealth
They say that money can’t buy happiness. All the same, most of us would appreciate the opportunity to check for ourselves.
The Great Conversation: Religion
Religion is a gigantic subject. The astonishing diversity of religions is only part of the reason; we have also to consider what religion is to different people, or to the same person in different ways.
García Márquez: Loneliness and Magic
His seamlessly surreal depiction of the world is arguably a very truthful kind of art, for it openly embraces the role that imagination inevitably plays in how we process the world
