ETYMOLOGIES

Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 69: The Sophoclean soul is more like Heraclitus’s image of psuchē: a spider sitting in the middle of its web, able to feel and respond to any tug in any part of the complicated structure. … The image of learning expressed in this style, like the picture of…More

… any individual caught in the unrestrained play of the passions and the immediate, unreflective pursuit of gratification is incapable of the highest human activity, a life of reason—incapable, that is, of a life of reason in its practical dimension, but also, and importantly, in its theoretical dimension as well. Sōphrosynē, for instance, is a…More

Hans-Georg Gadamer: I ask that the reader take what follows as an attempt to read the classic Greek thinkers the other way round as it were—that is, not from the perspective of the assumed superiority of modernity, which believes itself beyond the ancient philosophers because it possesses an infinitely refined logic, but instead with the…More