Why I am also a Roman concerning Morals Ancient philosophers, as far back as the early Greeks, framed the question of “a good life” as one of opposition. When is a life good, beautiful, satisfying? What is happiness – one used to say “blessedness” or “felicity”, or the philosophical term Eudaimonia – and when is a life “happy”? Two opposites...

Some years ago Ex-Minister Heiner Geißler(1), on the occasion of a political confrontation with the Greens or SDP, remarked: one must occupy terms and definitions like train stations. Independent of the militaristic undertones, his appeal expresses an entirely correct and important maxim of thought: terms, newly arising or coined, found (according to Plato, the ideas themselves are eternal) or discovered,...

Freestyle I’ve been asked about the somewhat odd title of my last blog entry: “Ave atque vale.” Ave means “welcome,” and vale means “adieu”; perhaps I’ll leave the TwitLonger commentary for now. I want to explain it more thoroughly. My salutations, and the writing that follows, are in Latin because I feel entirely Roman myself: say, one from the time...