Category: dKo journal

Great religious coincidence. Last week I wrote to a friend: “But mainly the sense of Jewish superiority was in relation…to the idol worshipers. It would have been interesting if there were strong contact between Jews and Buddhists, but it didn’t happen. So there were not other high religions [in their world] to [give] respect [to],…

This came in this morning’s Aristotle message: “To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.” It came as news to me that he had said this. He never mentioned to me before. And if I am remembering the dates right, it must have come before Descartes’…

It could be a very curious experience sitting next to my father watching a bad movie. He thoroughly enjoyed anticipating the next line of a predictable dialog. This involved more than just getting the words right. There was also the timing. It had to be quick, and had to hit on the half-beat in the…

Got this in the email today: The lasting achievement of the Maccabees was not that they won a war but that they rekindled the light of hope in Jewish hearts and saved the faith of monotheism from defeat. – Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, 1997 [Background: Chanukah celebrates the victory in the…

Nobody knows what the Sun really looks like. –DKo

I’ve been getting an Aristotle Quote of the Day on my (Google) home page. Today it was, “Character is habitual action.” And–totally apart from the content–I am thinking, “What guts! To say something so flat out straightforward, so intellectually committed as those four words.” And there is nothing obviously true about these words. Where are…