Word: phaedrus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...considerable cost and suffering. He reveals some frightening facts about himself. In 1961 he suffered a mental breakdown and underwent a series of shock treatments, which wiped out many of his personal memories. To give his philosophical inquiries a dramatic edge, Pirsig refers to his shadowy pretreatment self as Phaedrus, the name of one of Socrates' straight men from Plato's Dialogues...
Pirsig's Phaedrus was a lonely man who, despite an IQ of 170, had trouble with his studies. He began at 15 as a college freshman studying science, but he soon could not keep his ability to reason within any accepted academic context. From hypotheses he would get not proofs but only more hypotheses. Because his mind kept searching for an underlying universal principle, he switched to philosophy and eventually went to India to study oriental thought. Phaedrus-Pirsig never thought small. His aim was to do nothing less than revamp the whole scientific method that operated from...
...Phaedrus, East met West in a synthesis of Buddhism's ideas on the pursuit of excellence and those of the French mathematician-philosopher Jules Henri Poincare, who in Foundations of Science (1902) claimed that the underlying reality was not to be found in solid objects but in the harmonious order of the objects. Phaedrus called this unobservable order "Quality" and spent years trying to convince his teachers, and later his students, that it was the missing link that would close the subject-object gap and the schism between classic and romantic, between art and technology. Whether...
Britten's characteristic eclecticism dominates the score. As always, he fits great economy of means to his amazing instrumental versatility: a platonic ode to Phaedrus is decorated with a harp; the oncoming plague is heralded by a growling dark tuba. The overture to Venice is glitteringly warm, like the Adriatic itself...
...everyday drama of human encounter. For them, the city was the supreme instrument of civilization, the tool that gave men common traditions and goals, even as it encouraged their diversity and growth. "The men who dwell in the city are my teachers," said Socrates in Plato's Phaedrus, "and not the trees or the country." In turn, the city transformed them into something they had not been previously ard could not have become without it-men who within a few generations produced more thought and works of beauty and value than the race had ever seen before...