Saves 0 The question, in its simplest form, is this. If you replace every single plank of a ship, one by one, until not a single original piece of timber remains, is it still the same ship? One might be tempted to say yes, of...
Saves 0 From Stagira to Athens Aristotle wasn’t Athenian. He was born in Stagira, a small Greek city in Macedon, around 384 BCE. This made him a foreigner in Athens (i.e. a metic) without citizenship rights, always...
Saves 0 The senses report only appearances, according to Plato. You see the sun moving across the sky and conclude it circles the earth. You see a stick bent in water and conclude the stick is bent. You see shadows on a wall and...
Saves 0 The democracy had executed Socrates. People were exhausted by politics, skeptical of grand claims, and wary of anyone who asked too many questions. Philosophy could have died there, and could have become a footnote about...
Saves 0 Before Socrates, philosophy was about the water and fire and atoms, the movements of stars, the nature of Being. After Socrates, philosophy turned inward. The question became not “what is the universe made...
Saves 0 Before philosophy, explanation meant narrative. Everything had a mythological personality behind it, and a divine intention. Then around 600 BCE, in Greek colonies along the Ionian coast, a handful of thinkers asked a...
Saves 0 The locals warned him of the fumes and the guides spoke of men who went up and didn’t come down sane, or didn’t return at all. He, however, never contrived to register such idiosyncrasies spoken by only the foolish...
Saves 0 The Tree and the Patients I have been basking in the thin sunshine since half past five, and I tell you this not as boast nor as pastoral affectation, but as the most essential fact about the kind of doctor I have...
Saves 0 The Eve of Everything Tomorrow was D-day. He sat at his escritoire, the same escritoire at which he had sat for nineteen years of examinations, submissions, auditions, and assorted ordeals, and found that he could not...
Saves 0 It was a close and dark night pierced only by the occasional, ghostly flash of sheet lightning. The utter darkness of the night was not merely a matter of weather or time. It was something far graver. One could walk these...