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Before I go deep on Aristotle, I figured I'd mention something I've been thinking about lately, which is aesthetics. Following up on some research I've been doing into the music of J.S. Bach for my "Meditations on Bach" project, I recently read a book about the founders of modern aesthetics during the German Enlightenment (Christian Wolff, Alexander Baumgarten, etc.). It turns out that these early thinkers saw aesthetics as a practical discipline; unlike post-Kantian philosophers of art who are interested in purely theoretical questions or, at best, epistemological justification of critical judgment, the originators of aesthetics wanted to spell out principles that would guide artists in the task of bringing more beauty into the world. Immediately I perceived parallels to philosophy as the personal love and practice of wisdom. Consulting my ancient Greek dictionary, I discovered the word φιλοκαλία / philokalia, which I would describe as the personal love and practice of beauty. This is a fascinating topic that I've sketched out in slightly more detail in a work-in-progress essay (I even subtitled it a "manifesto"), but I won't have time to dig into it much further until I complete my Aristotle book. So many projects, so little time...
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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Although I don't make New Year's resolutions, inevitably one does think about priorities as the year winds down. One realization I've come to recently is that I need to finish off more of my long-term projects. Because my Aristotle book is the farthest along (I've been researching it for five years!), I'm recommitting to it in hopes of completing a first draft by the end of 2025. This means that I'll have to cut back somewhat on blogging, pair reading, public-domain publishing at the Monadnock Valley Press, catching up on news and long-form cultural analysis, etc. Instead, I'll be reviewing the book and article summaries I've created, improving the outline, drafting and honing the text, identifying chapter epigraphs, and so on. Where appropriate, I'll continue to use my weblog to work out my thinking on various Aristotelian themes; however, I might be posting less frequently on other topics.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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My publication activity at the Monadnock Valley Press waxes and wanes; 2022 was a busy year, 2023 was relatively quiet, and in 2024 I republished more works from the public domain than in any previous year since founding the site in 2008 (e.g., I published on 118 separate days this year, whereas the average in previous years was 18!). This time around the haul included:
However, 2025 will likely be much less prolific, since I have books of my own to write; I'll probably focus on works that help move my own projects forward, such as ancient Greek drama and history along with a few epic poems.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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In her book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argues that there is a subtle yet essential difference between value and worth: the concept of value is irreducibly social because it first emerged only within modern market economies where everything can be exchanged for everything else, whereas the worth of a person or artifact or living being is inherent within its own independent existence. Thus, according to Arendt, philosophers made a grave mistake when they imported the concept of value into politics, ethics, and aesthetics (the so-called "value branches" of philosophical inquiry). Consider, for instance, what happens when we speak of the relative value of the life of inquiry and contemplation vs. the life of social and political engagement vs. the life of making money vs. the life of pleasure and enjoyment. In modern times these wildly disparate ways of life are all on an equal footing of "value", which means we need to find a common standard of measurement for them. Just as in the market everything can and must be valued in terms of money, so now in ethics everything can and must be valued in terms of what the psychologists call subjective well-being, i.e., pleasurable feelings. As a result, the concept of value leads inexorably to a lowest-common-denominator utilitarianism. By contrast, the concept of worth helps us keep separate things that should be kept separate; as a result, we can come to understand that these ways of life are far from commensurable and that some of them are fundamentally better than others. Yet deliberating about worth takes more intellectual effort and moral courage (not to mention the fact that it can seem positively undemocratic), which could be why many people prefer to avoid it...
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
It's been exactly ten years since the last installment of my "intellectual history", so I figure it's time to say something about changes in my thinking since then.
One trend has been my deepening dedication to philosophy as a way of life, and not to any particular philosophical school. Although I began reading Pierre Hadot's books on philosophy as a way of life around 2011, writing my books on Thoreau (2017) and Nietzsche (2019) definitely reinforced this outlook. Indeed, at root this has always been my approach to the love of wisdom: I've never been enamored of purely theoretical, abstract, or academic philosophy, which is why I decided all those years ago not to pursue a Ph.D. in the subject.
A second trend has been my re-immersion in ancient Greek thought and culture. The Greeks have never been far from my mind, but intensively researching Aristotle's ethics for the last five years has rekindled my appreciation for what they achieved. In addition to all my Aristotle (and Plato) readings, this year I revisited both the Iliad and the Odyssey (twice!) and also started composing an epic poem about Pyrrho and Alexander the Great; next year I'll likely re-read Hesiod, the Greek lyric poets, and all of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to round out my literary explorations.
Third has been a continued mellowing and moderating of my political perspective. Gone are my days as a fire-breathing libertarian. Although I still favor an evolution toward greater freedom, I have enough intellectual humility at this point to see that societal problems are incredibly complex (as one example, it seems to me that legalization of marijuana, long a hobbyhorse of libertarians, has been far from an unalloyed good). Moreover, I have come to realize that I am powerless to change the political climate; some might find such a realization distressing, but I've found it liberating.
Fourth, over the last two years I've been reading more fiction, supplementing my longtime and continuing practice of reading poetry. During my working years, my exposure to novels, plays, and epics had slowed to a trickle, but of late I've quite enjoyed reading Homer, Virgil, Victor Hugo, George Eliot, and of course the plays of Shakespeare (all three dozen of which I've devoured in the last 12 months).
Mention of "my working years" introduces a fifth trend, as the three decades of my career in Internet technology and business recede into the past: a turn to a more contemplative way of life. Whether I think of it as Hindu vānaprastha or ancient Greek theōria, increasingly I am drawn more and more to research, reflection, and inquiry now that I am freed from the need for nonstop action.
Finally, and related to this contemplative turn, I've been exploring more deeply the vast world of music more. Playing music has always been my favorite form of meditation, ever since I first picked up guitar and bass in my early teens. Lately I've been studying music more seriously, delving further into harmony, listening deeply to pieces of music I'd like to understand (and where possible grasping them from the inside out by learning to play them on guitar or bass), doing a bit of composing, etc.
I expect all six of these trends to broaden and deepen in the coming years.
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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My reading list contains hundreds of items. Indeed, I maintain multiple such lists, since some of them are dedicated to particular research topics or historical figures on which I plan to write books of my own, such as Pyrrho, Socrates, and Shakespeare. Periodically, however, I like to think about how I would cull my reading list down to absolute essentials if forced to do so. The general principle seems to be: which authors would I most want to interact with in future years, for the sake of learning, enjoyment, and contemplation?
Having pondered it again recently, I'd say that nowadays my desert island books would look like this:
For the ancient Greek authors, I'd want both English translations and Greek originals. I'd also need some reference books: the OED, Webster's Dictionary of 1841, Smyth's Greek Grammar, Cunliffe's Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect, and the LSJ (standard dictionary of ancient Greek). Because some of these are published in multiple volumes, all told that's about thirty physical books.
Naturally this leaves out many, many books and authors that I'd like to explore or re-read, but difficult decisions would need to be made if I were shipped off to that mythical desert island...
(Cross-posted at philosopher.coach.)
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