I will get to my explication of Plato soon. In the meantime, I wanted to share one of the most beautiful and inspiring philosophical passages of the Western intellectual tradition. Perhaps I will write about it sometime. Right now, however, I do not want to say anything about it for fear of ruining it. Just enjoy.
It is right also that philosophy should be called knowledge of the truth. For the end of theoretical knowledge is truth, while that of practical knowledge is action (for even if they consider how things are, practical men do not study the eternal, but what is relative and in the present). Now we do not know a truth without its cause; and a thing has a a quality in a higher degree than other things if in virtue of it the similar quality belongs to the other things as well (e.g. fire is the hottest of things; for it is the cause of the heat of all other things); so that that which causes derivative truths to be true is most true. Hence the principles of eternal things must be always most true (for they are not merely sometimes true, nor is there any cause of their being, but they themselves are the cause of the being of other things), so that as each thing is in respect of being, so is it in respect of truth. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book II, end of chapter 1)
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