The point of climbing a mountain isn’t so much about reaching the summit as in what you bring down from it. Once you’ve caught a view of the limits of what’s possible you can explore the domain of the possible with greater freedom and understanding.
Philosophy only flourishes because certain brave, queer souls have looked on the world as it is and wondered why it might not have been some other way.
It’s not nice to think of yourself as a monster. There’s a strong tendency to want to harmonize the monstrous jumbling of categories in our self-understanding. But doing so creates further problems.
Literacy is one of the most transformative technologies that humans have ever invented. So transformative is it that it’s hard to imagine your way into an oral mindset from a literate perspective.
We’re used to being the smartest things on the planet. What happens when that’s no longer the case?
Plato, Plotinus, and the rest saw philosophical argument and investigation as one part—granted, a central part—of a broader way of life that was essentially mystical and spiritual in its outlook.
Reflecting on the religious conflicts of his time, Zera Yacob resolved to use reason to determine which aspects of these religious traditions did indeed derive from God and which were the inventions of contentious humans.
Starting with Plato, philosophy has systematically marginalized both literature and animals as beneath the dignity that philosophy has established for humankind.
How are animals of the same species subjected to such different treatments? Part of the answer, I think, is that we humans don’t quite know what to make of creatures that are both so similar to us and so different.
Humour and horror both provoke surprise by confounding our ordinary way of making sense of things. But humour creates an atmosphere of absolute safety and horror creates an atmosphere of absolute danger.