I started by asking myself, “How is the story of Egypt abstracted?” There are many ways this can be done, some of them deeply personal or mystical. But in the spirit of the assignment, I decided to look at the story as the myth of a community repressed to its core and finding a spiritual liberation which allows them to externalize their identity into expression. I browsed randomly until I came...
A few thoughts on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Every culture has its ancestral story. This is one of mine. This is a story of survival. The Holocaust happened The Holocaust happened because of a world embedded deeply in antisemitism. It was embedded deeply with antisemitism because every country in Christendom had subjected Jews to second-class citizenship, to be denied, ransomed, evicted and...
Setting: Aristotle (the philosopher) and Alexander (the young, one day to be ‘the great’) are walking home from a speech by Protagoras the sophist. Alexander: Are the words of Protagoras true; that the ways of men are whimsical and at the mercy of the winds? Or perhaps it is true that man is the puppet of his soul? Aristotle: What a fine question young Alexander. The Oracle of Apollo...
The title is a quirk of etymology, having been born in the Greek courts, spread through the early Chrisitan’s spiritual and philosophical defences, and ended up meaning something like a “regretted guilt”. Not so here. I prefer the alternative title: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Socrates voices by Plato On one hand, this is a document. On one hand, this is a story. On...
Editor Notes: Editorial notes: Shai’s interest in the French Revolution is likely driven by his study of classical philosophers and his desire to better understand the period in which they lived and the impact it might have had on their philosophical views. The specific reference to the French Revolution starts in his review of Edmund Burke’s “Philosophical Enquiry into the...
The Ancient Greeks who presaged our philosophies, political systems, and arts emerged in a land that had already been settled by mankind for tens of thousands of years. Despite what some of them believed the Greeks were not been born out of the Earth, but rather from the ashes of earlier societies. In Greece’s prehistory – the time before writing – entire societies, including...
