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- Reading group: Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, one set of dwelling places a week
Count me in. I'll be reading with the Orthodox hesychast tradition in the back of my mind, which has its own long discussion of prayer of the heart and of how to test experiences. One question to…
- When Aristotle calls humans political animals, does he mean we need a government?
A note from Thessaloniki: in modern Greek, the word for state is kratos, which originally meant power or strength, while politēs means citizen. Our own language keeps the difference that English trans…
- Was Kant an idealist in the same sense as Berkeley?
Something else, I'd say, though a fascinating something. Eriugena belongs to the Christian Neoplatonist tradition that runs through Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, whom he tra…
- How did Cynicism turn into Stoicism? What did Zeno keep from Crates, and what did he drop?
The Cynic tradition didn't end when Stoicism absorbed it. Cynics were still wandering the Roman Empire centuries later. The emperor Julian, in the fourth century, wrote speeches attacking the Cyn…
- If the One cannot be described, how did Plotinus manage to write so much about it?
Not a beginner's confusion: critics have always pressed it, and Plotinus saw it coming. First, why he says the One is indescribable. Anything we can describe is determinate: it is this and not th…