"I suppose you're right," Socrates said. "Of course I'm right," the priestess Diotima said. (Symp. 206e)

Blumenthal dropping a brutal opening to a review

It is disconcertingly more comfortable to respond to certain emails when you know they are AI-written and yours in turn will be read only by an AI. So many of the anxieties regarding how a message may be subjectively received evaporate.

It’s never too late reminder: Erasmus only began to teach himself Greek in his thirties.

The academic (ideally) leads the best of lives: by the merit of having read many books, he may discover what are the true few he must spend the rest of his life re-reading, and consecrate himself to this Repetition.

Damian Caluori's (Plotinus on the Soul, pp. 42-44) compellingly lucid explanation of Plotinus' interpretation of the 'greatest genera' (μέγιστα γένη) of Plato's Sophist

Seriously enjoying this at the moment

"that the First is power, that is, overwhelming power (ἀμήχανος δύναμις)...this claim should be trusted on the basis of all the other things we observe, because there is nothing, not even at the extremes, that does not have the power to generate" (Plotinus, Enn. 5.3.16)

A perverted shadow-image unto an age desperate for a genuine asceticism, which must instead content itself with this kind of parody

Not sure if this is simply personal cope but I feel like the "ROI" on having deep postgraduate+ specialism on niche topics in the humanities is about to do an unprecedented about-face

'being keyed up with this enthusiasm for the world of sense, it is on the one hand in cooperation with the soul of the universe as a whole that it dominates the external object of its administration and joins in the supervision of the cosmos, but through its wish to administer a part and [the soul] find[s] itself isolated and increasingly attached to that in which it is involved...' (Plotinus, Enn. IV.7.13; ed. Gerson)

'You can be sure that such men who can be hired for pay, who work for a daily wage and who are always ready to work for any employer, will never be found daring to claim any share in the art of ruling.' (Plato, Politicus 290a)

'The truly good and wise man (ὁ σπουδαῖος), therefore, has already finished reasoning when he declares what he has in himself to another; but in relation to himself he is vision (πρὸς δὲ αὑτὸν ὄψις).' (Plotinus, Enn. III.8.6; tr. Armstrong)

'But as things are, forgive me, Diogenes, that I imitate Heracles, and emulate Perseus, and follow in the footsteps of Dionysus, the divine author and progenitor of my family, (Διονύσου... θεοῦ γενάρχου καὶ προπάτορος) and desire that victorious Greeks should dance again in India and revive the memory of the Bacchic revels (τῶν βακχικῶν κώμων) among the savage mountain tribes beyond the Caucasus...' (Plutarch, De fortuna Alexandri II.332b)

Advanced nofap tech

Baudrillard is probably the best theorist of nothingeverhappensism: "Hyper-realized war and hyper-realized money circulate in an inaccessible space, but in doing so they leave the world just as it is." (from "In Praise of a Virtual Crash", 2 March 1988)