Making Sense of Sentences I

In Rhetoric, Aristotle defines the sentence as a complete thought. Princeton professor and literary critic Jeff Dolven notes one objective shared by all sentences: "The purpose of a sentence is to end."

Dolven is offering his thoughts on a "beloved or bedeviling sentence" each week in his current 8-part series "Life Sentences," appearing in the Paris Review. The first to be dissected comes from the pen of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:"The world is everything that is the case."

Why not bookmark Verbum Sapienti and catch the rest of the series?   

Colin Wilson: A Storied Life

Do you ― or does your father ― remember when John F. Kennedy died? How about C.S. Lewis? (Hint: it was the same day.) As science fiction author Ken MacLeod observes in Aeon, Colin Wilson also had "the misfortune" of dying on the same day as more famous man ― Nelson Mandela. Still for a self-taught working-class author, Wilson made some waves, beginning with his first book at age 24, The Outsider, hailed ― if only for the moment ― as Britain's answer to Sartre and Camus.

Games People Play

Children know something adults have forgotten, philosopher Mark Rowlands reminds us, something we lost when we began to play “the great game of growing up and becoming someone.” Today's world is a utilitarian one in which actions have instrumental value, worth not inherent in their essence but derived from the tokens they amass ― money, for one. “Work is a classic example,” Rowlands notes. In its pure form, play has no external purpose or reward. Young children know this intuitively, reveling in the joy of the moment. If we could get lost in their spirit, we might find what we have lost. Tennis With Plato

From Culture to Kitsch

"High culture is the self-consciousness of a society," social critic Roger Scruton notes in Aeon. Its works of art, literature, scholarship, and philosophy establish a shared frame of reference among educated people. A precarious achievement, high culture "endures only if  it is underpinned by a sense of tradition, and by a broad endorsement of the surrounding social norms." When these "evaporate," to use Scruton's understated euphemism, "high culture is superseded by a culture of fakes."         The Great Swindle  [audio]