Author: Dan
-
Book Notes III
Having trouble keeping up with this, need to get better about jotting down thoughts on books as I complete them, rather than trying to retroactively write notes. The Knight and The Wizard by Gene Wolfe (A) Two books that, like most (all?) of Wolfe’s series, are really one long novel. Ranks among my favorites by […]
-
Between Two Worlds
Key to understanding the self is the recognition that we are mediating beings, interposed between two worlds, spiritual and material, infinite and temporal. Created as we are in imago Dei, we mirror the hypostatic union of apparent opposites. This union is the root of our despair but also the grounds of our greatness. The possibility […]
-
Emma and the Philosophers
Fragments on reading Austen’s Emma through the lens of various philosophers. Emma and Kierkegaard Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Kierkegaard stresses that the second half of the command is just as important as the first: love of neighbor is grounded in and equal to (to exceed would be idolatry) our love of ourselves. […]
-
Socrates vs. Dionysus
Harrison argues that the narrative, or a narrative, of the Symposium is Socrates’s triumph over Dionysus. The Symposium takes place at a Dionysian celebration of a Dionysian celebration, an after-party of the tragic festival. Here Socrates shows himself unaffected by wine, rebuffs and baffles (while entrancing) Alcibiades who comes from without in the form of […]
-
Arguments from Conceivability
If abstractions are in fact real, not mere shadows, then their existence in the mind as abstractions suffices to demonstrate their reality. Thus, to conceive of something is to demonstrate the possibility of its existence. A problem here, beyond the fact that abstractions are mere shadows, is that it’s never quite clear what it means […]
-
Book Notes II
Master Book List Confusion by Stefan Zweig (A) A novella. In it, a wayward young man, essentially banished to a provincial university, finds himself entranced by a brilliant teacher who conceals a dark secret. The secret itself is pretty obvious to the modern reader, perhaps not so much to a reader in Zweig’s own time […]
-
Book Notes I
I wrote one of these a long time ago, intending it to be a regular thing, and here I am again, trying to make it a regular thing, to fill the gaps when I’ve got nothing else to say and, hopefully, to help me think more deeply about what I’m reading. Recently Finished The Civil […]
-
Notes from a reading of Charles Ogburn’s The Marauders.
I’ve never been very good about family history, despite my inclination toward history more generally and despite thinking that family, like local, history is something very important in this rootless world of ours. I’d like to blame my failings here on youth. I was relatively young when most of my grandparents passed (though not that […]
Dan Yingst 