“The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth.” — Simone Weil

I've started a Substack dedicated to my work on Western Christian mysticism and the techniques of ecstasy. Here is my first post, on Bede Frost's The Art of Mental Prayer (1931): open.substack.com/pub/simonekotv…

"Thinking is what happens when we do not know what to recall, represent, or repeat." — Adam Robbert dong all the hard work of paraphrasing Bergson for us. Must read.

Shall we not be alarmed by the example of Pythagoras who dared not profess to be wise, but responded that he was a philosopher, that is a lover of wisdom? From this arose the name…so that however great one's learning…one is still only called a philosopher. — Augustine, DT

“In making the effort, then, to think beyond the human condition, we come into contact, through intuition, with movements, memories, and a nonhuman consciousness deep within us. Deep within the human there is something other than the human.”

The week’s list is done and dusted.

New essay out now: The Practice of Bergson’s Intuition Henri Bergson makes clear that philosophy is upheld by transformations in perception, but we could do more to make those practices explicit. The handbooks of the religious traditions may show us how. In the essay, I

"If to do philosophy is to discover the primary sense of being, then one does not philosophize in quitting the human situation; it is necessary rather to plunge into it. The absolute knowledge of the philosopher is perception." — Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “In Praise of Philosophy”

This is very good.

Bookmarked.

We've been trying out a new (old?) format for online philosophical inquiry that we're calling Disputations. Disputations is a structured dialogue series that I’ve been developing with my friend and colleague Jacob Given. As the name suggests, we’ve taken inspiration from the

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Lecture No. 5 Attention Is an Art Form by Adam Robbert

I’ll be in Toronto giving a talk on September 24 as part of The Viaduct speakers series. Details and tickets below. Check it out if you’re in the area.

Back into this gem then.

This is the text from Hadot’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France. Therein he describes himself as homo novus, literally a “new man,” but more to the point, a “newcomer” or an “outsider.” The Romans apparently used this phrase to describe a person who was the first from