Anyone who studies the contemporary phenomenon of global warming, or who fears the insidious impact that the smartphone is having on our lives, or who remembers that there are enough nuclear warheads on enough intercontinental ballistic missiles to destroy human civilization with some ease, understands that modern technology threatens, indeed is likely, to overwhelm us.

Even before Plato, techne was conceived as knowledge of a determinate field that could be mastered by "the expert". Such a person becomes an authority to whom laypersons should, in their dealings with that field, defer. Techne typically results in a useful result.

What makes defeat so painful is just the awareness that the other has won. It hurts to lose because it feels so good to win.

Mathematics is realm altogether, one that is cold, hard, objective, necessary, clear and thus utterly non-human. Nonetheless, it is enormously useful as a means, to "turn the soul around from becoming to being."

Postmodernism - and is that term used much any more? - is simply a reiteration of the sophistic or the rhetorical worldview.

In our lives a dog is a dog rather than a former wolf, and it surely is not a cat, a difference that means an enormous amount to some people.

The great virtue, I think, of studying Aristotle - and, more importantly, taking him seriously as a possible teacher - is that he presents an alternative view of both science and the world.