The Daily Eudemon

Descartes, by placing ultimate importance on one's ideas, gave credibility to the outrageous ideas that littered modernity. Lycurgus put the “Spartan” into Sparta. Before Lycurgus, Sparta was like other Greek cities. Its citizens sang, celebrated love and good food, wrote poetry, and crafted fine pottery. After Lycurgus, Sparta became grim and tough, determined to keep its slave class under contro...

A Cistercian monk in Austria writes eruditely about David Foster Wallace. He appears to embrace "The Bridge Option" when dealing with modernity: embracing postmodernity and premodernity . . . bypassing modernity. Show notes here

He sat on his mother’s couch, smoking marijuana and watching the McCarthy hearings, cheering Tail Gunner Joe. He was 32 and it was 1954. In his 20s and the 1940s, he said he’d like to join his Russian comrades and fight against Fascism. He coined the term “Beat Generation” which became the proto-countercultural movement of the 1960s. He detested the 1960s counterculture, noting that the Beatnik’s...

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Montaigne was the godfather of modern skepticism. His was a “negative skepticism,” which disturbed Descartes enough to prompt him to come up with a positive response, which in turn gave us modernity, its fierce subjectivism, and the parade of “little gods” that have marred the last 200 years. Show notes here

Show notes here .  1. The wise know they start each morning as beginners. Robin Daniels 2. "In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention." Simone Weil 3. "My experience is what I agree to attend to." William James 4. "To enjoy the kind of experience you want rather than enduring the kind that you feel stuck with, you have to take charg...

Show notes here . Bacon’s books proposed a new method of inquiry. In technical language, he proposed that we rely on induction instead of deduction . Put a little more simply: Instead of trying to deduce truth from a priori principles and making our observations match the principles, he said we should make our observations and reach a posteriori conclusions from the observations. Put as simply as...

The fourteenth century was an era of singular richness in the history of Christian mysticism. Frank Tobin, Henry Suso, The Exemplar, with Two German Sermons . The 1300s. Europe in the grips of economic depression, war, and natural catastrophes. Europe still experiencing the spiritual wake left by the lives of Saints Francis and Dominic. A deep concern with the interior life seized large numbers of...

Show notes here Rene Descartes was kind of a dick. His famous saying, “I think, therefore I am,” is nothing less than a wholesale rejection of all authority—even objective truth—in favor of a defecated rationality and fierce subjectivism that belittles anything outside one’s own mind. The modern attitude created by Descartes does two things: 1. It enshrines one’s own beliefs or preferences as the...

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No, that isn’t a passage above the front door of Jeffrey Epstein’s residence on Little Saint James. It’s a popular saying of a medieval sect known as the “Brethren of the Free Spirit,” which has long been regarded, according to historian Norman Cohn , as “one of the most perplexing and mysterious phenomena in medieval history.” So perplexing, in fact, that Cohn himself conflated a genuine mystic,...

The Renaissance Believed in Magic Like Moderns Believe in Science In 1598, a huge renegade friar organized a revolt to liberate Calabria from Spain. Tommaso Campanella started the revolt with astrology: he announced to his followers that the stars portended great changes and revolution. He then added numerology, noting that the numbers agreed with the stars: the year 1600 was approaching and 16 is...

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He first articulated the western mystical tradition. We don’t even know who he was. But he pointed to the Tao. Show notes here . 

When Dr. Faust insulted the Tao, the devil appeared.  Show notes here . 

We intuit the Tao. That’s why our active hobbies engage us. Show notes here . 

Thomas Aquinas was an existentialist, in his own way. His existentialism was forgotten . . . to western civilization's detriment.  Show notes here . 

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