Plato taught that the body is the mere avatar of the soul, its prison, or even its tomb. His student Aristotle, on the other hand, turned the order of things around. He conceived the soul as the emergent truth of the body, the body's most complete and self-fulfilling actualization. Obviously, Ari

Classical, Classical rhetoric, Clever, Contemplative, Eclectic, Masculine, Pioneering

Plato was a divided soul. Torn between reason and passion, he gave birth to a philosophy marked by disconcerting duality. On the one hand, Plato was an artist and a poet: he encased his concepts in mystifying myths and slippery metaphors, worked out arguments in the form of dialogues rather than dry

Classical rhetoric, Clever, Contemplative, Homoerotic, Ironic, Mythic, Pioneering, Spiritual

Terry Eagleton is one of the few contemporary literary critics who haven't bought into Postmodernism wholesale. At a time when the terminology of Deconstruction is promulgated enthusiastically (and meaninglessly) in academia, Eagleton roots himself firmly in traditional Marxism. He maintains a carefu

Charming, Contemplative, Marxism/ideology critique, Political, Sophisticated, Witty

Descartes isolated himself in a cabin, set a ball of wax in front of himself, and set about determining what he could know. Martin Heidegger, some 300 years later, saw this thought experiment as all wrong: Descartes should have picked up the wax, used it, molded it. For Heidegger, the truth is reveal

Contemplative, Deconstruction, Ecstatic, Illusive, Phenomenology, Repetition, Spectral, Spiritual