Socrates | Socrates

Dec.18.2012 How Do We Explain the Tragedy in Newtown? We don’t. Carl Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”For months to come, Americans will make every attempt to fix blame somewhere for the tragedy in Newtown. “What kind of monster would do this?” Some will blame his mother....	Nov.01.2012 500 B.C.E. Women Break the Rules and Attend "Pythagorean Secret Society" The Pythagorean school that the famous Mathematical Wizard set up in Southern Italy over 2,000 years ago, was an illegal destination for women. Because the group was secretive, and the brotherhood tight-lipped, brave women attended the cryptic meetings. Some of the more famous historical names of...
Mar.20.2012 The Best American Mystery Stories--1998, Part 4 photo: front cover, from its Amazon page Another post in my series of critiques and reviews of the short stories in the volume. The hope here is that the reader will check out the authors reviewed positively here, as many of them are still publishing. The other blog posts can...	Mar.20.2012 Objectivity is a Slave to Subjectivity Measurement devices measure our expectations of what we are hoping to find. They have to: as sense-extensions, they can only find the stimuli that we already know how to digest. Nothing new here: Socrates talked about this with a slave boy named Meno way, way back. Point is:...
Sep.23.2011 To Examine Or Not To Examine (That Is The Question) Since Socrates, as transcribed and likely "enhanced" by Plato, is indisputably the founder of Western philosophy, it requires real chutzpah to post a blog questioning perhaps his most well-known pronouncement about life, namely, "The unexamined life is not worth living." (Apology, 37-38...	Sep.17.2011 INNER VOICES While my mother lay dying from breast cancer at the age of 47, she wrote a letter to her parents. Both of my maternal grandparents were extraordinary people. They were full-blooded Finnish and as my mother was their only daughter, they cherished and wisely guided her. My grandfather provided...
Mar.24.2011 Writer’s Responsibilities ~ Revisited … In the two posts, World Crises And The Fiction Writer ~ Can They Help Humanity? and Two Post Mashup + A Video ~ Writers’ Responsibilities, various ideas of the writer’s responsibilities to society were explored. One of the comments, from a man who has taught English for over 40 years, was...	Dec.08.2010 Another Semester Completed! Yippeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have finished my third semester at Vermont College of Fine Arts. This one was more challenging than the first two because it was the critical thesis semester. I really got into my topic - the illustrious objective correlative. So much so, I applied...
Dec.02.2009 Anger: the Right of Righteousness By the time we get out of kindergarten we have a sneaking suspicion that there is more than one take on reality. This realization (that things are not black and white) pretty much crystallizes by the time we get out of the high-school. What starts out as a clear-cut case of pain and pleasure and...	May.28.2009 Cole's Commentary upon Socrates A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true. Sounds like a closet Roman Catholic to me. Are we sure about his dates? Or is it a case of...