One could make the same case for reading Caesar, whose style in the Commentarii Cicero praised thus: Valde quidem, inquam, probandos; nudi enim sunt, recti et venusti, omni ornatu orationis tamquam veste detracta. This style works well with History and, I think, Philosophy.

Given the centrality of triads and circles as Denkformen in Proclus’s philosophy, I am inclined to hazard the thesis that, in him, we may have the first thinker for whom the “form” of thought is perfectly adequate to its “content.” The mathematical pattern of his thought

A solid essay and a good subject for reflection, but it makes me wonder: given the cited reconstruction of Socrates’s face, was he really so ugly after all? From the Symposium, I always assumed he was hideous.

It’s hard to take encomia about “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful” seriously, or exhortations about the importance of public life, when so much of modern American life unfolds amid strip malls, brutalism, office-parks, and cookie-cutter subdivisions.

In my opinion, more than 75% of every urban planning, architecture, and landscape architecture program today should focus on “SPRAWL REPAIR”. The work is endless. And virtually nobody is teaching it.

It’s interesting that number, like thought, for the ancients was always *of* some entity. They are both marked by “intentionality.” A purely abstract, or symbolic, mathematics (like symbolic logic), was a later development, as Klein showed. From this kinship of thought and

A new Syriac/Arabic Chronicle has been discovered, dating to 712/13 AD. It promises to shed much light on early Islamic history and perhaps other areas too. Adrian C. Pirtea

I have never been satisfied by vague descriptions of intelligible or intellectual being as “self-manifesting” or “self-disclosive.” Plotinus and Aristotle offer us greater precision when they speak of entities or states of affairs for which the fact (ὅτι) of their being is

It also strikes me that one could offer an argument for the existence of God based on this principle, though the details would obviously need to be worked out.

Not quite every day, just those with a "y" in, do I find the need to consult Schrevelius' Greek-Latin-Greek lexicon. Honestly worth its weight in gold!

It is always nice to come home.

Just learning now that Hans Urs von Balthasar might have known Syriac too. fml.

A good thread and an even better article on the Mellon Foundation’s partisan influence on academic life. As a conservative who cares about higher education, I think it poses the following dilemma: (A) Return to a more “value-free,” or apolitical, approach to funding—i.e., the