Category: Miscellaneous

In his paper ‘The Terminology for Beauty in the Iliad and the Odyssey,’¹ Hugo Shakeshaft makes some interesting observations which are of particular interest to those attempting to find a conception of the good, the beautiful, and the ethical/virtuous in Ancient Greek political thought. If, as is stated, Aristotle did indeed borrow the word wholesale from Homer, it would only be prudent to return to Homer to see where it all started.

Continue reading “Homeric Beauty” →

There are two claims in Joe Sach’s article¹ that I promised I would return to in my previous piece, but chose not to because it was not wholly relevant to the line of argument it had taken on. However, I did not intend to abandon them. These two themes coalesce around a phenomenon that I have seen when I studied the history of art: that we have become viscerally afraid of beauty. Sachs lays out some of the groundwork:

Continue reading “Are we afraid of beauty?” →

Another GRE essay …

The documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’ draws upon hundreds of hours of interviews from tech executives including the inventor of Facebook’s ‘like button’ to show how smartphones and tablets have been used by tech giants to manipulate and influence the lives of teenagers and adults alike. The alluring draw of instant and constant connectivity, the makers of the documentary claim, is something to be wary of, especially because of the subconscious ways in which technology seeks to influence our thoughts, feelings, interactions, and habits. In a particularly striking scene, the documentary depicts a hologram of a fictional user suspended in digital space like a biological specimen preserved in formaldehyde, ready to be dissected: that digital persona resembles the human only in form, but is a starkly different figure on the inside. The indelible and grave impact that portable devices and the software they run have on young people is most prominently shown in their social skills, which seem to become increasingly stunted and awkward.

Continue reading “Social Skills and Social Media” →

Another GRE Essay …

Whether or not students ought to conform to a singular, monolithic curriculum until they matriculate at college depends on a litany of factors, most prominent of which are the nature of the nation and the extent to which education is available to all. Education has been an important part of thinking about the nation ever since the seeds of political thought were sown in the utopic world of Kallipolis in Plato’s Republic, in the more achievable Magnesia in the Laws, and in Aristotle’s Politics, most famous for recognising man’s nature as the polis animal. Through the recommendations put forth by Plato in the Republic and Aristotle in the Politics, I seek to argue that a nation should require all of its students to study a common core curriculum that can be customised with different options to better suit the needs of the nation and of students.

Continue reading “Public Education and a Common Curriculum” →

Yet another GRE essay.

Claim: An action is morally correct if the amount of good that results from the action is greater than the amount of bad that results from the action.
Reason: When assessing the morality of an action, the results of the action are more important than the intent of the person or people performing the action.

The consequences of an action is but one small part of the action itself, and the extent to which one ought to keep consideration of the consequences of the action as the focal point of ethical and moral judgment is itself up for some degree of debate. Whether or not the intent of the action ought to prefigure some modicum of judgement before which the actions are judged in terms of their consequences is a moral question that is best stated in the form of a dilemma. Here, I will seek to argue that while judging actions on the basis of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ is important, in measuring the totality of the action and sizing it up for judgement, intent is a necessary bedrock upon which we must hoist our flag.

Continue reading “Consequences and Intent” →

Yet another GRE essay …

Writing in the fourth century BC, the Greek philosopher Aristotle made two crucial observations in his treatise Politics about the human condition in relation to our nature as political animals: first, that scarcity was the human lot and man could never break free of the competition for scarce resources, and second, that hierarchy in production and organisation could never be erased. It was only those who had the leisure to rule and then be ruled in turn that qualified as citizens for Aristotle’s ideal polis: political equality entailed some degree of material sufficiency and isolation from economic forces. Contemplation, Aristotle noted, could only happen in the absence of material wants, and thus Aristotle designed an entire schema of politics where the household, the oikos, aimed to be a self-sufficient unit that enabled its head to live a political or a contemplative life. That was the hallmark of a good polis, of the ideal city-state. But those subject to the will of the oikos-master, the head of the household, were slaves in Aristotle’s treatise: either slaves by virtue of their position in the household or slaves by virtue of being subject to economic forces and thus having no place, no oikos, where they could retire to at the end of the day. Thus, for Aristotle, the good life was mutually exclusive from the life of toil and penury: but it was only readily available to a few. The welfare of all, the summum bonum, as the medieval schoolmen following his stead called it, lied in everyone recognising their place in society and fulfilling their duty, and for some it meant labour, and for others it meant leisure for intellectual pursuits. I will seek to illustrate that the general welfare of the people is not mutually exclusive from the advancements of those who govern it or exercise intellectual labour in such contexts.

Continue reading “Is the surest indicator of a great nation the achievements of its rulers, artists, and scientists, or the general welfare of its peoples?” →

Another interesting GRE essay. The prompt was as follows: “Sports stars and movie stars have an obligation to behave as role models for the young people who look up to them. In return for the millions of dollars that they are paid, we should expect them to fulfill this societal responsibility.”

If I had more time, I would have certainly alluded to passages from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.

It is man’s innate tendency to search for idols and to lionise those he sees as superhuman. But the extent to which this lionisation and idolisation is appropriate and healthy is up for question. According to the claim presented, sportsmen and thespians ought to be held to higher standards of conduct because they earn copious amounts of money and tend to provide inspiration, especially for the youth. However, this stance suffers from many issues: it correlates ethical action with high incomes; it assumes sportsmen and movie stars are paid for this expressed purpose; and that such payment construes a moral and ethical obligation to be well-behaved and pose as “role models” for the younger generation. I will seek to argue that this is not the case: that being a sportsman or a movie star has no relation to their ethical conduct or their excellence, that what happens off screen and off the field is of no bearing to these professions, and that the sum total of this expectation is misplaced because it pushes into the domain of obligation for a few what ought to be the domain of all.

Continue reading “Do sports stars and movie stars have an obligation to be exemplars of good conduct?” →

Another GRE essay …

The Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau once famously declared that “man was born free, but everywhere he was in chains.” For Rousseau, the source of this state of oppression was our political life, part of which included education, a subject he most famously expounded upon in Emile. What was the purpose of education? What must be the focal point of learning? For Rousseau, the answer was simple: the child was the measure of all things, and a good education inculcated the importance of citizenship. But for all his supposedly rebellious proclamations, Rousseau, the arch-Enlightenment figure, could not bring it in himself to stop the humanist mores of the modern and ancient world: a great degree of formal education lingered in the background, even if it was administered by what were then unorthodox methods. But Rousseau only serves to illustrate a larger point: that formal education seeks to free our minds and spirits by training them in the art of intellectual discipline, and in their restraint they provide a foundation. It is when the information it provides becomes and end and not a means to achieve something that it becomes burdensome and tiresome, stifling the creativity of those it is imposed upon.

Continue reading “Does formal education restrain our minds and spirits rather than set them free?” →

Another GRE practice essay — please forgive inadvertent errors and personal flourishes.

At the culmination of a survey class that spanned the history of art from its very origins in the Venus of Willendorf to the High Renaissance and through to the postmodern age we live in, I could not but wonder: we stand on the shoulders of giants. While the Academy in Florence would not let me climb onto the shoulders of Michelangelo’s David, the influence of giants –– on the pioneers and the paradigm-setting geniuses of any field –– is visible to those invested in its study. It is this that I hope to argue, with the aid of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Thomas Hobbes and Nicolo Machiavelli, and William Shakespeare: that even those figures we may think to be geniuses in their field actually stand on the shoulders of the giants of their fields.

Continue reading “Is it impossible to make a significant contribution without first being strongly influenced by past achievements within that field?” →

I wrote this as a practice essay for the GRE; please forgive the fleeting references and discussions. Half an hour is not a lot to plan and write.

The extent to which the media, broadly understood, has pervaded our lives is hard to estimate with precision, but there is no denying that in recent years our lives have been increasingly proliferated by all forms of media, from the ubiquitous push notification warning one of an unopened notification to the rising popularity of video games. Fake news and deepfakes pose new thA Shreats to our understanding of the world like few other things have before, and this past summer, in the midst of a viral pandemic, cities in the United States, most prominently Portland, burnt under the brunt of violent protests. Increasing violence has been part of our public discourse for some time now, and it is hard to deny that it is having an outsized influence on today’s youth, who are faced with increased normalisation of violence and exposure to graphic violence at rates never seen before. I seek to argue that while the media consumed by a majority of today’s youth has accepted violence and representations of it as normalised, finding good role models among one’s peers and parental group can assist in alleviating this.

Continue reading “A Brief Note on Violence in Society” →