From the archive

The Figs in Winter archive is deep, here are some choice bits

Ancient bookstore, by Midjourney.

Figs in Winter now has several hundred articles on a wide range of topics, including various approaches to living a meaningful life (ethics), examinations of pseudoscientific claims (science), and essays on practical reasoning (logic). This occasional series is meant to remind my readers of some of this material for their enjoyment and use. All articles linked below are free.

---

Figs in winter and the idea of an art of living. “So if you long for your son or your friend at a time when they aren’t given to you, you’re longing for a fig in winter, believe me.” (Epictetus, Discourses, III.24.87) Figs are one of my favorite fruits. The common edible fig’s scientific name is Ficus carica, a plant native of the Mediterranean and western Asia. Figs are in season twice a year: during the first few weeks in June, and then again between August and October. That’s it. Which means that if I crave fresh figs in December or January I’m a bit of a fool. I’m even more of a fool if I don’t take advantage of the right season and manage to have my fill of figs when they are actually around. … (9 September 2022)

A few thoughts on Buddhism. A number of years ago I went through a mid-life crisis. Nothing that is not experienced by plenty of people. An unexpected divorce. My father dying of cancer. To those two events add getting a new job, which meant selling my house, buying a new one in the new location, moving across a good chunk of the country, and acquainting myself to new colleagues and a new environment. All in the span of a few months. Frankly, I got a bit shaken and disoriented. I need a compass by which to navigate those vicissitudes, a framework that would help me steady myself, reorient goals and priorities, that kind of thing. Since I had just finished my PhD in philosophy I figured surely the love of wisdom would help me figure out the answer! … (22 December 2022)

On the objectivity of ethical judgments. These days a lot of my students are moral relativists, that is, they deny the existence of objective moral judgments. Typically they do so out of good intentions, rooted in a sense of tolerance toward other cultures. Who am I, they implicitly ask, to judge the practices of this or that group? Of course, they do judge the practices of one group or another. Just ask them whether they object to the Nazi perpetrating the Holocaust and their relativism immediately goes out the window. As it should. … (21 April 2023)

What should we do with a tyrant? It’s hard to be in beautiful Syracuse, Sicily, as am I right now, and not think of tyrants. As I explained in a previous post, discussing Plato’s adventures in the city, it seems that for a long while Syracuse was bent on exchanging one tyrant for another. But the prompt for the current essay was actually composed several centuries later, in March 49 BCE, to be precise. Marcus Tullius Cicero was writing to his lifelong friend Atticus because he was trying to make up his mind whether to support Julius Caesar—whom he perceived to be a potential tyrant—or Gnaeus Pompey, who was nominally defending the Republic, but in fact had a good chance of himself becoming a tyrant, if given the opportunity. … (26 May 2023)

How to think about war with Thucydides. When I was growing up in Italy I studied ancient Greek history. My teachers, unwittingly or not, instilled in me the belief that the Athenians were “the good guys” and the Spartans not so much. After all, Athens was a democracy, and we all agree that democracy is the best form of government, right? Sparta, by contrast, was a militaristic timocracy, that is, it was ruled by a property owning elite. And even Plato (in Republic, book VIII, 545b-550b) lists it as the first form of unjust government. But then I read Thucydides’s famous History of the Peloponnesian War, and suddenly Athens didn’t look so much as a knight in shining armor anymore. Indeed, it looked like a not-so-subtly imperialist state intent in “exporting” democracy by way of armed conflict. No wonder so many have drawn a parallel between ancient Athens and the modern United States. … (4 August 2023)