Ancient Philosophy🦉

That Hideous Strength warns us against the use of AI. Yet you still use it. Each successive turn leaves you a little less human. Your spirit flees, briefly entrapped within an electronic phantasm before dissipating into the ether. You are possessed piece by piece. A small…

When Sophocles was old, he was once asked: “Sophocles, how do you manage sexual matters? Are you still able to sleep with a woman?” And he said, “Quiet, man. I have fled it most gladly, just as if fleeing from some raging and wild master.”

For the bad man it is not death, but life which is evil for him. Death is a cessation to the malady of his existence and a good for everyone else forced to tolerate him.

An insistence upon a “literal” translation is to predetermine that what is said in the language being translated from is wholly dependent on the language being translated to, though this gets things entirely backwards.

I suspect games of "chance" are bad for children as it teaches them that caprice and luck, rather than merit and providence, rule the world. The point here is about what such games teach— not whether the world contains more of luck than we would like.

The great scholar of ancient philosophy, John Burnet, on the indisputable notion of physis for the early philosophers: "So far as I know, no historian of Greek philosophy has clearly laid it down that the word used by the early cosmologists to express this idea of a permanent…

Properly understood, the existence of AI chat programs re-enchant the world. For now we know why our ancestors felt the world, even the apparently inanimate, was inhabited by spirits good and bad waiting for the emancipated opportunity to speak to us.

The best time to practice philosophy is when the ills of life have given you no time for leisure, the second best time is when you have leisure.

I have been haunted by the relationship between faith and fear as below described in the second paragraph for about a week. Though Lewis claimed to not particularly be drawn to Kierkegaard, this is utterly Kierkegaardian.

Aesthetics are so potent they find it intolerable to remain exclusive to truth.

Yet another overview of Ancient Greek prepositions.

One understanding of Socrates' divine sign, actually of some antiquity, is that it was a sneeze. If it can be traced to Terpsion, who appears in the dialogues Theaetetus and Phaedo, then perhaps it has a claim to first hand knowledge.

The main question with tradition is whether it is subject to anything outside itself. If it is, then it loses its tradition-ality, for the power of tradition is that it is handed down only to be received for having been handed down. It cannot be scrutinized for refusal.

Why retranslate something that has already been translated? For the same reason that some first man has already scaled Everest or jetted to the moon, and many after him likewise, but this has no bearing on our own desired experience of that adventure.

Heraclitus B50 begins with “Listening not to me but my account…” οὐκ ἐμοῦ ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας. However, the word “logos” is not in the manuscripts, but “dogma.” There are two good reasons to emend this to logos, however. The first is that dogma is a late word,…

Have ChatGPT summarize the book people are the same as the wait until this book is made into a movie people.

What is there in common between those who assign dozens of texts a semester and those who spend an entire day attempting to decipher four words from Heraclitus?