As I have argued in a previous essay,1 Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man seeks to establish the necessity of beauty for human life by offering two kinds of argument. The first argument turns on the salutary political effects of beauty, and the second on the concept of beauty itself, arguing that it …
True to its title, Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man examines beauty’s role in individual and cultural development. At its most general level, the Aesthetic Letters investigates two key questions: (1) What is beauty? (2) And what are its effects on human life? Inspired by Kant, Schiller attempts to answer the first …
“But my eyes are toward you, O GOD, my Lord; in you I seek refuge; leave me not defenseless! Keep me from the trap that they have set laid for me and from the snares of evildoers! Let the wicked fall into their own nets, while I pass safely” (Psalm 141:8-10 ESV). Hegel, the famous …
The decans (or faces/ πρόσωπα) constitute an enigmatic form of rulership in ancient astrology. Rumored to have originated in Egypt,[1] the decans were associated with particular stars whose faces shone through the constellations, thus giving rise to their alternative designation as “faces.”[2] Yet, after the inception of Hellenistic astrology and the transition to a tropical …
In the classical world, human action was thought to transcend mere stimulus and response. While a captive dog might be conditioned to salivate at the ringing of a bell, genuinely human activity was held to be too rich to be reduced to such a model. Human activity, in contrast, is guided by reason, and so, …
“As we know, it is also mistaken to limit the ‘freedom’ of interpretive choice to externals and marginal phenomena rather than think of the whole performance in a way that is both bound and free”—Gadamer, Truth and Method. (Emphasis Mine). Introduction The bounds (ὁρία) are an important yet perplexing form of rulership in traditional astrology. …
“Hegel came to connect dialectic with the triad, or with triplicity”—Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination. Triplicity rulership is a form of planetary jurisdiction in ancient astrology. As the name suggests, instead of a single planet presiding over a given domain (as house and exaltation rulers do), triplicity rulers come in groups of three, and these three …
Exaltation (ὕψωμα) is a form of planetary rulership (δεσπότης) in ancient astrology. Like the standard house (οἶκος) rulerships encoded in the Thema Mundi, exaltations were thought to be locations where planets flourished. However, unlike standard house rulership wherein every planet apart from the luminaries is given to two signs, in the exaltation schema, each planet …
Sect (αἵρεσις) is a crucial concept in Hellenistic astrology, forging a fundamental contrast between two groups of planets. One group, the diurnal, is led by the Sun and contains Jupiter as a benefic and Saturn as a malefic. The other, the nocturnal, is led by the Moon and contains Venus and Mars respectively as its …
Plato’s Symposium is a philosophical exploration of the nature and function of erotic love. Apropos the subject matter, the dialogue begins in confusion. The dialogue proper occurs between Apollodorus, someone so obsessed with Socrates that he has been given the nickname “the maniac” (173d), and an unnamed friend of his. Apollodorus recounts a story he …