Why read old and difficult texts
Might be handy for my reading of the Old Testament in 2025
experience, knowledge, reflection, and skill in dealing with men, combine to give an old man an increasingly accurate insight into the ways of the world; his judgment becomes keen and he attains a coherent view of life: his mental vision embraces a wider range. Constantly finding new uses for his stores of knowledge and adding to them at every oppo
... See moreArthur Schopenhauer • The Collected Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer (Unexpurgated Edition) (Halcyon Classics)
The writings of Plato and Aristotle are haunted by a figure who seeks wisdom of the highest things and who thereby gains practical wisdom, knowledge of how to govern. The first philosopher, Thales, fell into a well while looking at the stars, possessed by knowledge Aristotle called “wondrous, difficult and divine—but useless.” Yet Socrates fought c... See more
Zena Hitz • The Lamp Magazine | The Practical Wisdom of Eva Brann
You don’t have to upload any book into the system . The Great Cosmic Mind is smarter than most of the books you could jam into the context window. Just start asking questions. The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions. And now you have someone/something to ask!
I was reading a book on Indian history, and the author refere... See more
I was reading a book on Indian history, and the author refere... See more
How to read a book using o1 - Marginal REVOLUTION
With GPT there is no longer a reason for not reading a book due to its perceived ‘difficulty’
I don’t remember everything I read. But I do believe memory is an obligation, as St. Augustine encourages us, for the imagination is composed of the things we remember—books, art, liturgy, life experiences.
Reading up to 2024
We were to read Thomas Hobbes in the first seminar I attended. Strauss began without further ado to say that we would read only the first two parts of the Leviathan, that this was "disgraceful" but that we would have our hands full doing justice to even that much. After that, he turned unceremoniously to some introductory remarks.
The fir
... See moreThe aspect of Scott Buchanan’s life to which this memoir relates began, for me at least, with a college lecture he gave in October of 1944.
The lecture was a flight of high speculative fancy in which he tried to imagine the features of a Republic of Learning joined with a political republic.
If man is a political animal, his virtues compromised and
At the Morningside conference she presented the criterion for a great book she had learned from her classics professor at Brooklyn College, Alice Kober. “You know a great book,” Kober had said, “when the hair stands up on the back of your neck.”