Sublime

For Descartes, evidence is the core criterion of truth. Not superficial evidence, the initial intuition that is often false, but evidence constructed through a deliberate and systematic effort of clarification, verbalization, and explanation, which aims to make things perfectly intelligible until they become fully transparent: “Things that we

Comme le narrateur de La Soirée avec Monsieur Teste, Valéry pense à cette époque que « les têtes les plus fortes, les inventeurs les plus sagaces, les connaisseurs le plus exactement de la pensée devaient être des inconnus, des avares, des hommes qui meurent sans avouer ». Comme lui, il imagine peut-être que rien ne lui résisterait s’il tournait

Leonardo dedicated himself to his anatomy studies with a persistence and diligence that were often lacking in his other endeavors. During his frenzied years of work from 1508 to 1513, he seemed never to tire of it and kept digging deeper, even though it meant nights spent amid cadavers and the stench of decaying organs. He was mainly motivated by

Franklin’s account, like Aristotle’s, is teleological; but unlike Aristotle’s, it is utilitarian. According to Franklin in his Autobiography the virtues are means to an end, but he envisages the means-ends relationship as external rather than internal.

Je pénètre ta pensée : tu veux examiner si la tragédie et la comédie seront admises ou non dans notre État. Cela peut être, et quelque chose de plus ; car je n’en sais rien pour le moment. Mais il nous faut aller où nous conduira le souffle de la raison. C’est bien dit.

A discovery is an incurable disease;

the extraordinary corpus of Patrick Harpur, one of the most criminally underrated scholars of our time.