Headings

The Republic

Of shadows

The cave, considered

A brief digression

Notes on method

Body · Emphasis

Philosophy begins in wonder — in the moment we look up from what we were doing and ask, with some surprise, what it was we thought we were doing. Aristotle called this thaumazein, and thought the whole of the examined life unfolded from it.

The unexamined sentence, like the unexamined life, is not worth writing.

Blockquote

The beginning is the most important part of the work.
Plato · Republic, II.377a

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle · Nicomachean Ethics

Lists

Unordered

λόγος — the word, argued
πάθος — what is suffered
ἦθος — the shape of character

Ordered

Read slowly.
Read again.
Write the margin.

Task

Acknowledge the cave.
Turn around.
Climb toward the light.
Return, and try to tell the others.

Inline code · Keys · Links

To begin, press ⌘N for a new note. Wrap a phrase in *asterisks* for emphasis, or in **doubles** for weight.

An ordinary link leads to Phaedrus, 275d. Within a vault, [[Plato's Cave]] takes you sideways; a #ethics collects by theme.

Code block

# The soul, as Aristotle had it,
# is the form of a living body.
def soul(body):
    if not body.alive:
        return None
    return {
        "logos": body.reason,
        "pathos": body.feeling,
        "telos": 42,
    }

Table

Faculty	Greek	Concerns
Reason	λόγος	what can be argued
Spirit	θυμός	what is defended
Appetite	ἐπιθυμία	what is wanted
Mind	νοῦς	what is seen

Callouts · Admonitions

Note

Terms left in Greek are so left on purpose — their English equivalents smuggle in centuries.

Epigraph

Know thyself. — inscribed at Delphi.

Caveat

The Socrates of Plato is not the Socrates of Xenophon.

Aporia

If virtue is knowledge, why do the knowing err?

Mathematics · LaTeX

Inline, as in $e iπ + 1 = 0$ , a formula should sit in the line without disturbing it.

\int a b ƒ(x) dx = F(b) - F(a) (5.1)

\forallx \in ℝ, x 2 \geq 0 (5.2)

The displayed form stands apart in Cormorant italic, as a classical typesetter would have wanted.

Figure · Image

plate · red-figure amphora

A kylix attributed to the Brygos painter, 490 BCE. Figures drawn with a brush, background filled around them.

中文 · CJK Markdown

论习惯

——我们是自己反复所为之事。

亚里士多德在《尼各马可伦理学》开篇便提醒我们：善并非偶然之举，而是习惯的果实。一个公正之人，不是在审判时才公正，而是在不被看见时仍然如此。

卓越不是一次行动，而是一种习惯。
亚里士多德 · 尼各马可伦理学 II.1

两种节律

晨读——在日光尚未铺满桌面之前，翻开一本#经典。
夜录——合上书页之后，以一段注脚作结。
长久重复，则思之形自显。

小记 · Marginalia

中文与西文并置时，Noto Serif SC 的字重（300/400/500）与 Cormorant / EB Garamond 自然对齐——视觉密度相近，节奏一致。

这是哲学的一处温柔：它不要求立刻改变，只要求每日一步。¹

Footnotes · Horizontal Rule

The soul, on Aristotle's account, is not a thing a body contains but the form of a living body¹. That is why the soul cannot outlive the body in any simple way — it is what the body is doing when it is alive².

This is a different matter from Plato's. For Plato, the soul is prior to the body and separable from it; the body is the chariot, the soul the charioteer³.

De Anima, II.1. "The soul is the first actuality of a natural body which has life potentially."
Hence Aristotle's difficulty with personal immortality — a difficulty the Neoplatonists would later labor to relieve.
See Phaedrus, 246a — the famous myth of the charioteer and the two horses.