Jeff Sullivan

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

@realJeremyCarl If you think it’s a coincidence that the “blocked”

[Bret van den Brink @BretVDB]

I first read Boethius’s Consolation as a teenager, and I’ve re-read it a couple of times since then. I revisit its poems more often.

“Almost no one” is a tad hyperbolic, but the message is clear: read Boethius. I concur: read Boethius.

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

@CatholicClod I think a few decades before Einstein, Bergson comes up with time as a dimension of space and critiques it! 10/10

Matter and Memory is at least as good.

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

Having encountered many people using parts of Epictetus’ hypothetical argument this responds to, it’s nice to have an unequivocal reply. Will use this one going forward.

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

but for the present be content to dwell in this country wherein He appointed you to dwell. Short is the time of your dwelling here, and easy for them whose spirit is thus disposed.

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

What manner of tyrant or what thief or what law-courts have any fears for those who have thus set at nought the body and its possessions? Stay where you are, and depart not without reason.”

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

Epictetus 1.9 has a longer take on the “open door” thing he mentions here and there (and is basically what I think he’d say to a depressed Porphyry):

“Men as you are, wait upon God. When He gives the signal and releases you from this service, then you shall depart to Him;

[Yorùbá Daimōn @timmodryoid]

For the Platonists in the house.

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

@Heliotrophy This. The next step would be the construction or designation of public places for gathering, not a more complicated private ritual.

[Heliotroph☀️🍇 @Heliotrophy]

If you pray to the gods, give incense, libations, or cakes as offerings, and make an effort to live by basic cardinal virtues and connect with people trying to do the same - congrats! You have successfully reconstructed paganism.

Anything extra, if it is truly necessary, will be revealed through signs.

The idea that we need to have a feature-complete institution for exactly reinstituting the Eleusinian mysteries airdropped to us before we even have communities asking for it is ridiculous, and it comes from a combination of our adversaries making facetious demands and tepid or timid potential converts latching onto a reason to dither and delay.

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

Goodbye my friend. Thank you for all your guidance.

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

Breath of Fire 3’s “Sandy Sound” is the sound of Askesis for me- the soundtrack to now and maybe to the end.

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

I’m interested in everything so no, I don’t know what I like, thank you.

[Michael McGill 🏛 @mcgillmd921]

Don’t stop with Lives.

Plutarch’s Moralia is filled with brilliant essays on virtue, leadership, friendship, education, and the human condition.

If you’ve only read Lives, you’re missing an entire side of one of antiquity’s greatest minds.

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

in the Discourses he tends to attack with simple “you say you can’t be sure which is which but yet you never drink your shampoo or wash with honey” the use and manifestation is enough sometimes (though having more rigorous refutations is also good and important imo)

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

While I don’t like Wittgenstein’s image of letting the fly out of the fly bottle, I do like his earlier goal of philosophy- “to allow one to stop”. I sometimes over systematize to kind of distract myself from things I don’t like or feel like doing

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

Taken as one mode rather than one’s entire method, it reminds me of Epictetus arguing with the Skeptics. Epictetus no doubt studied the more comprehensive refutations of Chrysippus and Antipater, but

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

So the primary notions and roles are two angles we attack mistaken judgements from, along with logical reasoning.

On Duties pairs really well with Epictetus- lots of mutually reinforcing overlapping themes between them.

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

Epictetus’ philostorgia one is great to come back to. He really is nice to the guy actually; and he lays out again the process of practical reasoning pretty clearly.

We get an impulse to do something (he ties it directly to judgement here) then we should check it

[Jeff Sullivan @OSullivanFactor]

Unlike the stubborn friend, this guy appears to have done so, but not satisfactorily, so Epictetus guides him through it (relating the appropriate actions of many roles based around care for the man’s sick daughter) again quite amicably, I think.