Musings!

Thetis’ lament is for her soon to be dead son, Achilles. After Achilles discovers that his best companion, Patroklos, has been killed in battle, she comes to console him, not only for his grief towards Patroklos but for hers as well; because the will of Zeus and fate are catching up to Achilles. When Patroklos dies, Zeus has finished carrying out the honor  (τιμή, timē)  that he promised to return to Achilles, but Achilles didn’t realize that it would mean the death of his best friend. The everlasting glory that Achilles achieves is through the Iliad’s kleos , which begins with the lament of the fallen hero. Thetis reminds Achilles that if he were to seek the revenge of his best friend’s death, it would mean his, and so he replies with, “I must die soon, then; since I was not to stand by my companion when he was killed.” ( Iliad 18: 94-100). At this moment in the narrative, Achilles’ menis is dead. By sending Patroklos into battle, disguised as Achilles , he has ...

On the last week of the Supreme Court's 2012 term, the Court ruled that the petitioners for Proposition 8 in Hollingsworth v. Perry (No. 12-144) --an initiative passed by Californians (in 2008) to amend the Californian constitution to define and limit marriage to that of only a man and a woman-- lacked Article III standing to bring forth the case before the Court. It was a 5-4 decision, written by Roberts, joined by Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan. Justices Kennedy, Sotomayor, Alito, and Thomas dissented.  According to the majority's opinion, the petitioners (ProtectMarriage.com; the private "non-profit" entity defending Prop. 8 in the courts since the State of California had chosen not to appeal) not only had no jurisdictional standing before the Supreme Court, but had no standing when it came to appealing the district court's decision to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (COA). For that reason, the Court never got to the merits of the case, and vacated...

A criticism that Jean-Jacques Rousseau levies against John Locke and the liberal tradition, is the conceptual origin of man in the state of nature, in which he addresses the lack of pinpointing the true, natural man that has become the template for Locke and others in legitimizing the need of civil society. Rousseau makes the claim that that their “natural man” is nothing but a “social man” and that they have not gone further in time to make a legitimate assessment of the true, natural man. Rousseau boldly claims that Locke has misinterpreted social man as natural man, but even goes to great lengths to demonstrate that he has been able to discover the true attributes of man in nature, and develops his argument on the perversion that is the forming of the civil society and the implications on man. For Rousseau, natural man is broken down, to where he de-personifies man into a beast—the opposite for Locke and the liberal tradition, which creates a natural man with social elements, lik...

            Language plays an important role in Dante’s Inferno [1] , for it will be the means to assess not only Nimrod, but also Dante’s own transgression, seeing, as his journey through Hell also concerns the perverse use of language in his writings. The placement of Nimrod in the ninth circle of hell as a giant is a testament to the implications of using a perverse language to test the limits of man in pursuing the divinity of God. The Nimrod of hell, shares the name of the biblical Nimrod who erected the Tower of Babel, and instigated the schisms of language and caused confusion of man’s desire in reaching God. For Dante, writing the Inferno is to be able to recall and retell the events he witnessed, through language. The comparison I aim to make in this essay is that of Dante to Nimrod, seeing as they have both employed language to evoke the grace of God, whether that is by retelling a journey through Hell, or by physically trying to reach Go...