Meno’s Thousand Speeches
About a third of the way into Plato’s Meno, a rich, well-connected young man loses the thread completely and gets irritated about it.
Meno had walked in confident. Virtue was his subject. He’d given, by his own count, thousands of speeches on it, to large audiences, and they had all been well-received. Then Socrates asks him what virtue actually is. Three attempts later, Meno has nothing. He accuses Socrates of being a torpedo fish: the flat electric ray that numbs whatever touches it. Both my mind and my mouth have gone numb, he says. I’ve got nothing left to answer you with (Meno 80a–b).
July 15, 2026
Living from the Neck Up
The picture comes to us most directly from Descartes, who argued in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) that mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of substance, the mind a thinking, non-physical thing, the body an extended, mechanical one. In his Treatise on Man, he went further and described the body explicitly in the language of machinery: nerves as pipes, animal spirits as hydraulics. The philosopher Gilbert Ryle later mocked this whole arrangement as “the ghost in the machine” (Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 1949), but the mockery never quite dislodged it. Culturally, we still mostly live inside the Cartesian frame.
July 13, 2026
The Optimization Trap:
Aristotle drew a distinction in the Nicomachean Ethics that’s easy to skim past because it sounds like a technicality, but I think it’s the whole story. He separates techne – craft knowledge, the know-how of making something according to a method, where success is measured against a fixed external standard – from phronesis, practical wisdom, the capacity to perceive what the right action is in a particular situation, where the standard isn’t given in advance but has to be discerned each time, in context, by a person of settled character.
July 6, 2026
Borrowed Wanting and the “Serious Man”
I think about a version of this conversation a lot, because I keep half-hearing it in different forms. Someone gets the title they’d been working toward for years. Their name is on the door, they received the salary bump that finally makes their family stop asking when they’ll settle into something real. Then, somewhere in the celebration, almost as an aside, comes some version of: I don’t actually know why I wanted this so badly. I just know everyone else wanted it too.
July 3, 2026
The Pendulum of Success:
Contemporary positive psychology calls this the Arrival Fallacy, conceptualized as the mistaken belief that reaching a significant goal will produce a durable shift in wellbeing. The term is recent; the observation is not. Arthur Schopenhauer identified this structure of experience with considerable precision in the mid-nineteenth century, and his account remains, philosophically, the more interesting one.
June 30, 2026