Category: Philosophy
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On Migraines
A letter on perception and aesthetics. S.R., I have, since childhood, suffered from migraines. Nothing terribly unusual, yet I’m disappointed to have never experienced the disturbances of one’s visual field which we commonly associate with them, known as auras, and gladdened to have largely avoided other symptoms— nausea, vomitting, vertigo, sensitivity to light and sound,…
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On Music
A letter on moral psychology and a fractured identity. S.R., I have bored you, I’m sure, with the seemingly endless, tedious, trivial repetition, or have bothered you with the slow, inept movement of my hands, as if I were first learning to use them, and my complaints, of pain, at little progress over great swaths…
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On Poetry and Philosophy
A letter on meaning and methodology. S.R., Forgive me if I’ve told you this story before. I recall, once, sitting in on a philosophy lecture while in college — something on Plato, I can’t recall what— and that a particular professor was also in attendance, of whom I was quite fond, and himself a friend of the…
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On Boardwalks
S.R., I’ve mentioned before, I believe, the unfortunate circumstances which led me to spend the summers of my college years working in a sleepy coastal town far away in a foreign land.
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On Moral Progress
A letter on personal growth and the possibility of self-actualization. J.G., In Plato’s Meno, Socrates concludes that virtue, rather than being teachable, arises in us through some divine dispensation: “From our reasoning, Meno, it appears that virtue comes about in us, in those whom it does, by a divine lot (moira) …” Meno 100b2–3 (my translation)…
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On Assent and Anxiety
Stoic Epistemology, Psychology, and our Peculiar Anxieties S.R., Our conceptions of mental illness would doubtless be foreign to our spiritual and intellectual forefathers; we possess vastly more nuanced theories and methods of its diagnosis (we would have ourselves think) when compared to our predecessors – but I am no historian of psychiatry, though I am…
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On Motion
A letter on stagnancy. S.R., You’ve tolerated my recent, superficial interest in the Presocratics, Plato’s Parmenides, my quips that there is no plurality of things, but rather only the One, and, my saying often, and succinctly, “Motion not real.” I find myself these days in a perpetual stasis; a lull; a stagnancy. The sun rises,…
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On Back Pain
A letter on illness and consolation. S.R., You have heard my many complaints these past few months, my groans, my sighs, my wincing, and amidst these that dictum of Plato’s which has ever been on my lips, that, “the body is a prison like an oyster in a shell,” but let me quote the fragment…
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On Sleepwalking
A letter on living intentionally S.R., I tripped, last night, crossing the lintel of my bedroom – yet I was asleep, and awoke to find myself bemused and slightly bruised, though I do recall images of my rising out of bed. I’m reminded of that fragment of Heraclitus, “But other men know not what they…
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A Contemporary Platonism
A personal letter on the realism of aesthetics and morality. S.R., I’ve never been much convinced of a thorough Physicalism – i..e, an ontology that doesn’t permit of the nonnatural. To my thinking, there are necessarily things that are immaterial (which exist in a “real” sense, i.e., realism rather than nominalism), which, though they correspond…
