Dinesh's most commented articles

• Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you. • In all things, strive to cause no harm. • Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect. • Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted. • Live life with a sense of joy and wonder. • Always seek to be learning something new. • Test all t…

One summer in the early 1740s, on the last day of his life, a young man from Paris became the first modern cartographer to see the mountain called ‘Le Gerbier de Jone.’ This weird volcanic cone juts out of an empty landscape of pastures and ravines, blasted by the freezing wind called the ‘burle.’ Three hundred and fifty miles south of Paris, at a point on the map diametrically opposed to the capital, it stands on the watershed that divides the Atlantic from the Mediterranean. On its western slo…

*Reading does not make a man wise; it only makes him learned. *Respectability is the cloak under which fools cover their stupidity. *No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention *The man who in these conditions listens tolerantly to your opinion and allows that you may be as right as he, is a friend indeed. ~ Page 16 *How happy life would be if an undertaking retained to the end the delight of its beginning, if the dregs of a cup of wine were as sweet as…

. . . Politics begins, as it were, to expand its realm downward to the necessities of life themselves, so that to the philosophers’ scorn for the perishable affairs of mortals was added the specifically Greek contempt for everything that is necessary for mere life and survival. As Cicero, in his futile attempt to disavow Greek philosophy on this one point -- its attitude to politics -- succinctly pointed out, if only “all that is essential to our wants and comforts were supplied by some magic wa…

“Invidia” between creator and creature can be directly competitive. Mythologies, so often a shorthand for logic, bear witness. A lighthearted maiden boasts of spinning a web more delicate, more prodigal of adornment that any Athena can weave. She is turned into a spider. Apollo flays alive his rival in the mysteries and performance of music. Inevitably, the Agon, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon the duel, is reciprocal. The human creator senses that his achievements, however exalted, fall short of wha…

Denis Diderot (1713-1784) is best known as a co-editor, with Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, of the ‘Encyclopedie’ --a monument to rationalist, secularist, and humanist thought of the French Enlightenment. The central project in all his writing was to dispel supernatural and theistic superstitions and to ground all phenomena in naturalistic explanations. That this could lead to panpsychism is perhaps surprising. Like LaMattrie and Maupertuis before him, Diderot grappled with a fundamental problem:…