More specifically concerning: socrates
23.04.02 – Tuesday
23 April 2002, around 13.58.
This gives me the shivers, because I don’t think it’s actually about painting: In these places, though the stroke may be incomplete, yet the intention is carried out. Only when you realize that there are two styles of painting, the free and the detailed, may you join in discussions about painting. —Chang Yen-Yüan This, on […]
Elenchus
16 September 2002, around 13.35.
Socrates was married, you know, and his wife, Xanthippe, was a shrew. Perhaps that’s why he liked to sit in the cobbler’s shop and talk with young aristocrats about the meaning of words. ‘The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.’ How many a man has said that, in the course of […]
formicae
18 July 2003, around 14.04.
From a review (via A&L Daily) of a biography of Hans-Georg Gadamer (of whom I am as ignorant as a newborn): Was Gadamer really like Socrates? Or did he lack the courage that made the Greek drink poison rather than submit to the mob? Uh, Mr. Reviewer, sir? Socrates drinking the poison? Uh, that was […]
Socrates Silenos
27 October 2003, around 8.49.
Began reading The Mask of Socrates: the Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, and was struck by the following passage: The earliest portrait of the philosopher originated about ten to twenty years after his death and shows him in the guise of Silenus. In flouting the High Classical standard of beauty so blatantly, this face […]
Montaigne 1.44
13 November 2015, around 8.34.
anachronism What, then, is sleep? And what, if any, are its virtues? A sound sleep the sign of both exhaustion and courage. The knowledge we have of this mans unmated-haughty heart by the rest of his life, may make us judge with all securitie that it only proceeded from a spirit so far elevated above […]
Montaigne 3.12
27 January 2017, around 18.36.
Four (of eight) heads of Socratesfrom Lavater’s Lectures on Physiognomy (p. 160) It is a great thing to have been able to put such order into ideas as pure as those of a child that, without altering or stretching them, he produced from them the finest results of our mind. The mind he shows us […]
24.ii.2021
24 February 2021, around 17.25.
‘What would all knowledge of the present be without a divine remembrance of the past, and without an even more fortunate intimation of the future, as Socrates owed to his daemon?’ —Johann Georg Hamann, A flying letter to nobody, the well known (trans. K. Haynes)
whistling Lillabullero
3 March 2021, around 5.07.
What on earth does this Socrates of yours mean?
Citation (66)
14 March 2021, around 5.43.
howling at the moon…
mellowing
24 November 2021, around 9.47.
Knowledge of values, in fact, is a matter of direct insight, like seeing that the sky is blue, the grass green. It does not consist of pieces of information that can be handed from one mind to another. In the last resort, every individual must see and judge for himself what it is good for […]
crumbs
15 January 2023, around 4.56.
αὕτη οὖν ἀρχὴ τοῦ φιλοσοφεῖν, αἴσθησις τοῦ ἰδίου ἡγεμονικοῦ πῶς ἔχει: μετὰ γὰρ τὸ γνῶναι ὅτι ἀσθενῶς οὐκ ἔτι θελήσει χρῆσθαι αὐτῷ πρὸς τὰ μεγάλα. νῦν δὲ μὴ δυνάμενοί τινες τὸν ψωμὸν καταπίνειν σύνταξιν ἀγοράσαντες ἐπιβάλλονται ἐσθίειν. διὰ τοῦτο ἐμοῦσιν ἢ ἀπεπτοῦσιν: εἶτα στρόφοι καὶ κατάρροιαι καὶ πυρετοί. ἔδει δ᾽ ἐφιστάνειν, εἰ δύνανται. ἀλλ᾽ ἐν […]
procedural
11 August 2023, around 4.37.
…only a particular concatenation of circumstances will reveal that one man always acts in a good way because his instinctual inclinations compel him to, and the other is good only in so far and for so long as such cultural behaviour is advantageous for his own selfish purposes. But superficial acquaintance with an individual will […]
back in the day
12 February 2024, around 15.29.
Socrates & co.
de monstra demonstranda
22 February 2024, around 11.26.
Medea, bad mommy extraordinaire, engaging in a bit of light witchcraft, illustration by Johann Wilhelm Baur to Ovid (ca. 1640s) The school of Criticism has made known in print its superiority to human feelings and the world, above which it sits enthroned in sublime solitude, with nothing but an occasional roar of sarcastic laughter from […]
okey-dokey
23 March 2024, around 12.40.
…the field is open to conjecture, so long as conjecture does not soar in the air but follows the true tracks that survive and is in keeping with the character of the times and the persons involved. —Jacob Burckhardt (The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas, p. 237) One can spend a lot […]
the lot of the faint heart
22 April 2024, around 15.34.
“Ich glaube, daß er kein Automat ist” hat, so ohne weiteres, noch gar keinen Sinn. “I believe that he is not an automaton”, just like that, so far makes no sense. —Wittgenstein (Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment, iv; trans. G.E.M. Anscombe et al.) An extract from Jean-Léon Gérôme’s ‘The Artist and His Model’ (1894) […]