Activity

[...] Greece is certainly a small country; but, in virtue of its geopolitical, cultural and economic position, it is an outpost of Europe and thus also its border. To see it in this way is to understand it as a permanent point of delimitation and contact between ‘Europe’—but also, and the distincti…

[...] becoming an academic in the humanities means becoming humiliatingly prosaic about the things one loves. It means having to accept the ways in which the exalted realms of the Literary, the Philosophical, or the Historical are also means to a modest paycheck and an escape from what, in Castle’s…

Active cultivation of useful intellectual qualities — not, it should be noted, instruction in that all-too-troubling cognate, culture. This argument of Nussbaum’s steers entirely and successfully clear of the implied elitism of “culture”; anyone who calls the book elitist simply hasn’t read it. The…

We made fun of the world because of our ironclad belief that the world could not go on as it had before. With governments, schools, factories, police forces, brothels, militaries, armies, wars, judges, colonies, executives, madness, the misery of productive work, the seriousness of upper management…

[...] in the words of I. A. Richards, “As the finer parts of our emotional tradition relax in the expansion and dissolution of our communities, and as we discover how far out of our intellectual depth the flood-tide of science is carrying us — so far that not even the giants can still feel bottom —…