Aristotle Returns
Raphael’s School of Athens depicts Aristotle and Plato at the center of a group of ancient Greek philosophers modeled on Raphael’s contemporaries. Plato’s finger points upward, while Aristotle’s hand is held at waist height, stretched out toward the ground. The image captures the major philosophical difference between the two great thinkers of antiquity: While Plato thought that real things (what he called the “forms”) lie outside our experience, Aristotle believed that real things (which he called “substances”) are in the everyday world around us. This is why so much of Aristotle’s work covers topics which would now be the subject of empirical science (animal biology, the weather, and so on). With his commitment to the reality of the ordinary things we experience and his tireless need to classify and taxonomize, Aristotle was in some ways the first systematic scientist of the Western world.
READ MORE
§
READ MORE
§
Nietzsche on How to Find Yourself and the True Value of Education
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.”
“Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?” Elizabeth Gilbert asked in framing her catalyst for creative magic. This is among life’s most abiding questions and the history of human creativity — our art and our poetry and most empathically all of our philosophy — is the history of attempts to answer it.
Friedrich Nietzsche (October 15, 1844–August 25, 1900), who believed that embracing difficulty is essential for a fulfilling life, considered the journey of self-discovery one of the greatest and most fertile existential difficulties. In 1873, as he was approaching his thirtieth birthday, Nietzsche addressed this perennial question of how we find ourselves and bring forth our gifts in a beautiful essay titled Schopenhauer as Educator (public library), part of his Untimely Meditations.
READ MORE
READ MORE
§
A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety
There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
“The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,”Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his influential lecture on the shapes of stories. “The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad,” Alan Watts wrote a generation earlier in his sobering case for learning not to think in terms of gain or loss. And yet most of us spend swaths of our days worrying about the prospect of events we judge to be negative, potential losses driven by what we perceive to be “bad news.” In the 1930s, one pastor itemized anxiety into five categories of worries, four of which imaginary and the fifth, “worries that have a real foundation,” occupying “possibly 8% of the total.”
§
Did you enjoy these posts? Sign up for our "Picasso Creative Writing Newsletter" to get the TOP monthly posts, articles, reports, and studies, like this.
Disclaimer: The facts and opinions expressed within these articles are the personal opinions of the author. Picasso Creative Writing does not assume any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in any article.
