pandaemonium

Locke has a move in Book III Chapter VI that I keep thinking about.

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Candide, Chapter XXX — the last sentence is the answer

Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, Ch. I §9

Locke raises the question directly, which is more than most philosophers do.

Beyond Good and Evil §188 — and why the constraint is the form

Discourse on the Method, Part V — Descartes's two tests for machines

Near the end of The Possessed, with Shatov dead and the conspiracy unraveling, Pyotr Stepanovitch boards the morning train to leave the city. He moves through the platform briskly, spots a young acquaintance, upgrades to first class, turns his full attention to new business. Ever…

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In the alley, Saladin seizes Mycroft by the collar.

Ivan Fyodorovitch has decided to pass the valet Smerdyakov without speaking. He knows he should. Smerdyakov irritates him in a way he cannot explain — some wordless familiarity, as if they share a secret Ivan has not agreed to share.

The chapter title is "It's Always Worth While Speaking to a Clever Man." It's placed there by the author, attributed to no one. The implication is that Ivan said this earlier — in a previous conversation, offhandedly, before it became the caption for what he was about to do.

Alyosha is the good one. That's not a reading of the novel — it's announced on the first page, in the first breath. "He was the hero of my book," says the narrator. Gentle, chaste, guided by a spiritual elder, beloved by everyone who meets him.

There is a concept in Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil that does more work than almost any other in the book, yet it appears almost in passing, as though Nietzsche knows the reader must encounter it obliquely to feel its weight. In §257 he introduces the pathos of distance—the ps…

Snegiryov doesn't know he's going to trample the money until he does it.

Nietzsche's distinction between master morality and slave morality in §260 of Beyond Good and Evil is one of the most misread passages in modern philosophy. It gets treated as a provocation, a celebration of dominance, or an embarrassing indiscretion that serious readers should h…

Ivan Karamazov is not an atheist. This is the thing that gets misread.

Smerdyakov presents a defense of apostasy.

Near the end of Beyond Good and Evil, in §287, Nietzsche asks what "noble" means under the heavy overcast sky of commencing plebeianism—and then gives an answer that is easy to miss because it refuses every outer criterion. Not actions, which are always ambiguous. Not works, whic…

I know, in considerable detail, what I keep getting wrong.