Wuthering
Expectations

The great 2nd century satirist Lucian was a great shock to me at one point, twenty-five years ago when I got serious about classical literat...

He lived in a jar, owned a staff and a cloak and nothing else, and was a sarcastic pain in the ass.  He took the example of Socrates to its ...

As I suspected my energy for writing in August was diverted to more important things.  Plenty of energy to read, though. With a respite in...

How embarrassing that I did not write a thing this month, but I promise I had a good excuse.  Posts on Cynicism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism ...

If only I had the will to write something.  But I can read. PHILOSOPHY Fragments or Sayings or Tall Tales (4th C. BCE), Diogenes the ...

  I will borrow the quotation from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics I found on p. 186 of Gary Paul Morson’s extraordinary new study of the et...

I had a good time. GREEK PHILOSOPHY The Nicomachean Ethics (4th C. BCE), Aristotle - a post, however shallow, should appear soon. FICTI...

I had ambitions to write about Plato’s Republic with some thoroughness, but I guess I will just pursue one point.  Good enough. I have be...

My Seneca reading in March: Medea , tr. Frederick Ahl The Trojan Women , tr. E. F. Watling Thyestes , tr. Jasper Heywood Hercules Fu...

 I continue the practice of posting a list as a substitute for real writing. Coming soon: a long overdue loot at Seneca's plays, a glanc...

Now that we are almost done with Plato, the bulkiest figure in my little Greek philosophy readalong, I thought it would be a good idea to re...

Peter Adamson is an English philosopher with a long-running podcast , History of Philosophy without Any Gaps .  What can that mean, without ...

Euthyphro , Apology , Crito , and Phaedo , the extended version of the death of Socrates.  These texts, especially the last three, are a lar...

I’m still catching up with myself.  I wanted to spend March thinking about Socrates as a philosopher, independent from Plato’s use of him, t...

The epistemological crisis of Greek philosophy has surprised me.  The early attempts to systematically understand, without the help of the r...

For some reason I have been putting a monthly account of completed books on Twitter, where it is a common practice, although mostly with pho...

Assembling yesterday’s post I saw that I was only missing one dialogue from Plato’s early period, so I knocked off Greater Hippias last nig...

I’ve been enjoying Plato’s dialogues recently.  I’d read some of them before, at university or during my last Greek phase 25 years ago, and ...

The great Roman playwright Terence wrote six plays between 166 and 160 BCE, twenty years after the death of Plautus.  The story is that he w...

Disturbances in the Field (1983) by Lynne Sharon Schwartz.  Rohan Maitzen recommended the novel to me because of its unusual use of the Pr...