“But how lovely and how fitting the sound of the lively and impressive I of Socrates! It is the I of endless dialogue, and the air of dialogue is wafted around it in all its journeys.” — Martin Buber, I and Thou, 46 (Trans. Ronald Gregor Smith) Martin Buber was a 20th century Austrian-Israeli philosopher…
In this article I want to continue my discussion of Plato’s Philebus, a fascinating work in which Plato lays out his recipe for the good life. The passage I want to focus on today relates to Delphic ‘self-knowledge.’ In ancient Greece, an important religious temple at Delphi had on it the inscription, “know thyself” and this…
What would you give to hear perhaps the world’s greatest philosopher share his personal recipe for the good life? This is exactly what we get in Plato’s The Philebus, one of his final works, and his ultimate say on the question of how an individual can live a good life. Is knowledge or pleasure more…
Pity is the feeling of sorrow for another person’s suffering or hardship. The word has its origin the ancient Greek word piety, which can be understood to mean a devotion to goodness. Pity was central to ancient Greek thought: it can be seen as the true theme of Homer’s The Iliad, which is often considered…
Sir John Falstaff — he’s Shakespeare’s low-living, gluttonous, perpetually indebted senior citizen, who steals for a living, meets all outward criteria of alcohol dependency, and is called a coward by his closest friends the first time we meet him. This charge is only amplified when, a little later, he plays dead in battle and then…
The therapeutic alliance is the working relationship between client and therapist. Friendship is an equality made of harmony. According to a growing body of research, the therapeutic alliance may be the most important factor to a successful therapeutic outcome — more important, even, than the therapist’s theoretical orientation, or approach to therapy. So, what makes…