Tag: Socrates
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A History of the Divine Ideas as Thoughts of God
The Ideas as Thoughts of God The divine ideas have a notorious history in philosophy. They are commonly spoken of as the ‘thoughts of God,’ and utilized in arguments for God’s existence, e.g., Edward Feser’s ‘Augustinian Argument.’ Their history is pretty nuanced, and provides an interesting area for investigation. Prior to the Platonic Successors we…
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Maximus the Confessor on the Transfiguration
For those who aren’t familiar, the transfiguration (Matthew 17.1-13, Mark 9.2-13, and Luke 9.28-36) is an event recorded in the gospels where Christ, Peter, James, and John go up onto a mountain and Christ is “transfigured.” The event is clearly meant to indicate the divine approval of Christ’s mission on earth. But there seems to be…
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Why Read the Church Fathers?
“Fun” What is the appeal behind spending thirty or more dollars to buy an old book, opening it up to find the language verbose, dense, and placid? And then to sink hours and hours into the text with little to nothing to show for it? Well, when put like that, reading sounds more like torture…
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From Hegel to Death: Thoughts on Plato’s Phaedo
(Written August 2020) Below are some thoughts I wrote down while doing a preliminary read of the Phaedo. Despite being over 2000 years old, there is much to gain from reading and re-reading it. It is certainly a dialogue I’ll be reading the rest of my life. Thoughts on Death in Phaedo The first theme…
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Is it Just to Break an Unjust Law?
(Written Feb. 2019) A short comparison of the views of Plato and Martin Luther King Jr. I usually squirm in my seat when forced to make a universal statement (see how I phrased that?); they are just so binding in my opinion. When one says that it is just to break an unjust law, they…
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The Unexamined Life
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates One of Socrates’s most famous quotes, he says it during his trial and it appears in Plato’s Apology. Carl Jung also made a similar statement when he said, “Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.” But what do these great thinkers mean? Yesterday when I…
The Reluctant Philosopher 