Plato’s “Crito”.

Crito was written by Plato. Below, some paraphrases of this text. They do not necessarily reflect my opinion on a given subject.

1. One can say that you really are a happy person when they see you calm even when a disaster happens.
2. If death is unavoidable, you can only accept it.
3. People hate people those who care more for their money than for their friends.
4. Still, you don’t have to care about what people think of you anyway.
5. Spreading lies about someone can cause their indirect death.
6. If the people could really operate great evils, they were supposed to also be capable of great good deeds (but they are not).
7. Most people lack critical thinking, seemingly operating with randomness.
8. Sometimes it’s cheap to buy a judge.
9. Don’t have children, unless you are capable of suffering with them.
10. If someone has an opinion about you, don’t accept it unless you are sure that you should accept.
11. Socrates accepted his sentence because he was being faithful to his principles, it was a matter of integrity.
12. Don’t accept suggestions from those who don’t know better.
13. If you accept those, you may ruin yourself or die.
14. Being alive isn’t enough, if you don’t live well.
15. If you don’t do anything without considering what others would think, one can wonder how your actions amount to.
16. If acting unfairly is always wrong, then you should seek revenge from injustice by promoting injustice.
17. You owe respect to the ruler of the nation you belong in.
18. The law may submit you, but the law isn’t unchangeable and you should try to change them if you think they are unfair.
19. If you dislike the laws in your place, move to another place.
20. If you like your nation, you may want to improve it.

Notes on “Confessions”.

“Confessions” was written by Augustine. Below are some notes I made about his text. They aren’t quotations and may not reflect my views on a given subject.

1. It seems like some people can’t function without having a religion.
2. To talk about a god without knowing that god risks you to talk about the wrong god.
3. God punishes.
4. But God also forgives.
5. If God is the wisest being in existence, disagreeing with him is being wrong (that doesn’t exclude the possibility of misinterpretation).
6. A baby can’t have his desires completely fulfilled, because he can’t communicate his needs through words.
7. Is a fetus an being on it’s own or part of the mother’s body?
8. Time is a never-ending “today”.
9. Children aren’t innocent.
10. Children are capable of envy, aggression and other things, which puts the concept of innocence in question.
11. We often don’t remember our childhood, but we sure did a lot of embarrassing stuff as children.
12. How can we care if children are innocent or not, if we often can’t remember a time when we were “innocent“?
13. We are start learning to speak through observation, thanks to need for communication.
14. We can’t punish a child for not being able to learn something if they aren’t mature enough to understand.
15. Coerced work is inferior to really voluntary work.
16. If you want to get someone to accept your ideas, you aren’t supposed to do that by force.
17. An immoderate soul hurts itself.
18. Grammar, obviously, is more important than fiction literature.
19. Learning a second language is hard because you usually have to rely on artificial terms to learn it, while the first language is learned at home in an easy-going manner.
20. It’s much better to learn by curiosity than by being intimated to.
21. At school, you learn a lot of stuff that you won’t ever use.
22. Attributing human vices to gods is an attempt at making humans look less hateful.
23. Bad behavior in adults is the same as bad behavior in children, just in different scale.
24. By saying the the Kingdom of God belongs to children, says Augustine, Jesus is using children as a metaphor for being humble, rather than talking about inherent innocence.
25. Love and lust may present themselves as the same thing.
26. A married person can’t fully commit to other things.
27. A teacher not always cares about your development as person.
28. There’s cultural pressure upon men for libidinous acts.
29. A thief also doesn’t want to have their belongings stolen.
30. A person can commit a crime because it’s thrilling.
31. It’s possible to love “too much”, when your love makes you do bad things.
32. If you commit a crime for a good cause, it’s still a crime, though it’s also more worth being forgiven.
33. Some crimes are easier or more fun to commit if you are in group.
34. Gratuitous (senseless) bad behavior is like tickling: it’s fun, but you don’t know why.
35. Blind love can stimulate us to lie to the loved person, in order to appear to be something that you are not, going out of your way just so they can like you.
36. Loving implies taking the risk of jealousy.
37. It’s disturbing that we tend to like tragedies (when they happen to someone else).
38. Maybe that’s because we feel empathy over those who suffer.
39. Philosophy isn’t always anti-religion.
40. Fiction, as long as it’s seen as fiction, is not something to worry about.
41. “Image and resemblance of God” isn’t at all physical appearance.
42. Evil is lack of good.
43. Absence is an evil.
44. There’s a type of virtue implied in every act.
45. A person can do bad things if they believe it’s a commission from God.
46. The problem of astrology is that people attribute the responsibility of their acts to the stars.
47. People often learn astrology because it’s fun, not because it’s useful.
48. If astrology does something right, it was luck.
49. Don’t place all of your love into something perishable, such as a friend or lover, because you will be devastated if that person dies.
50. Crying is comforting, like a pain-killer, but it can be addictive.
51. A lover must be ready for an eventual death of the loved one.
52. A person can defend an idea that they actually don’t believe in, to be better accepted.
53. It’s unlikely that you would be able to explain God rationally.
54. You can’t run away from God.
55. Religion and science aren’t mutually exclusive.
56. Divine knowledge is more important.
57. A person can speak like a researcher in order to make his lie pass as acceptable.
58. “The letter kills, but the spirit vitalizes” isn’t literal.
59. We often have to believe in things that we don’t fully understand, such as medical prescription, unless we are trained in medicine.
60. How can I know if my parents are really my parents, if I don’t remember anything about the day I was born?
61. Getting drunk may be tempting, but that’s a shameful kind of joy.
62. Nonetheless, it’s better being happy and drunk, than building your happiness onto criminal things, because a drunk person, for a short while, has nothing to worry about, while a criminal is often worried about the police.
63. A lot of people turn to religion for fear of death.
64. If we define God as someone who isn’t incorruptible, then we should verify if an incorruptible thing really exists.
65. Fear is evil, so, if you fear, evil exists.
66. If twins are born under the same astrological configuration, see if their fate or personality traits are the same.
67. Species are put in a hierarchy.
68. Corruption happens due to a disturbance in a person’s “amount of good” (in this case, it could be health).
69. Existence is good, so, if someone is deprived from all good, they disappear (die).
70. The Bible is a text that can be interpreted in several ways, so it’s natural that some seem more logical than others.
71. Paul’s doctrine has similarities with Platonism.
72. Having money and wealth as life goal can make your life tedious.
73. Not everyone can withstand marriage.
74. When you find something that was lost, the joy is always bigger than the joy of always having something, because, when you find something that was lost, you both feel happy for finding it and experience immediate relief from pain.
75. When important people are converted to a faith, more people feel encouraged to join too, that’s why new religions aim to convert celebrities.
76. Feeling unsure isn’t the same as having two souls or two minds.
77. Life isn’t always a battle between good and evil, because we sometimes have to choose between two equally evil things.
78. The religious chant is a way to push sadness and boredom away, to make meetings more tolerable.
79. A person can be perverted by praise, even if it’s praise coming from friends.
80. Body can resurrect.
81. It doesn’t matter where you are buried after you die.
82. If a person had a good life and died peacefully, there’s no need to feel sorrow; it’s more of a matter of slowly adapting to the person’s absence.
83. We cry a lot over things of less importance, but also are often indifferent to tragedies.
84. You should confess your sins to God, but particularly, not to someone else, in a selected place, like how confession is currently done.
85. It’s impossible to fully know someone else, specially because we often don’t know ourselves completely either.
86. God was here first.
87. There’s a way to escape every temptation.
88. Reason is supposed to interpret what we see, hear or feel.
89. People bow to the things they created, such as money, submitting themselves to it and submitting the next generations as well.
90. Isn’t possible to get close to God without the use of reason.
91. Almost everything that we have in memory came from our five senses.
92. Our memories are interpretations of what we once felt and may not reflect what we actually felt.
93. A sensation leaves an impression, which we can recall even when that sensation is absent.
94. Language depend on memory.
95. The mind can copy concepts that are in another mind, without having experienced what that mind experienced, through means of teaching and learning.
96. We can work with math even when concrete elements are absent.
97. “Spirit” can stand for “memory”, depending on the context.
98. Recalling emotions won’t necessarily make us relive those emotions.
99. Memory is a big mystery.
100. The ability to think is proof that we are alive, because we can’t think if we don’t exist.
101. Memory isn’t exclusive to humans.
102. How can we define something we don’t feel, such as happiness?
103. If happiness as concept exists in memory, then we felt it once.
104. Different people define happiness differently, but what those definitions have in common?
105. It seems like happiness is related to joy, which is something that we feel.
106. If you learn something good, you can say that you learned something divine.
107. Not all pleasures are forbidden.
108. Gluttony is harder to avoid than lust, because you, naturally, eat more often than you have sex, obviously.
109. We aren’t fully aware of our weaknesses, as no one can fully known themselves.
110. A person can do something because they are curious, despite knowing it’s frowned upon.
111. Sensuality, curiosity and pride are three common sources of sin.
112. A person can only enjoy a praise if they are praised for something they want to be praised for.
113. If you claim that you hate boasting, you are already boasting.
114. If nothing exists, then you create.
115. God sees the time as an eternal present, rather than sectioning it into past, present and future.
116. Time can be infinitely divided.
117. If you claim to be able to measure past (which is gone) or future (which hasn’t come yet), then you are claiming that nothingness can be measured.
118. Past and future only exist in the present, as memory and anticipation.
119. Still, speaking about before and after, if it’s needed for communication, isn’t a bad thing to do.
120. Time is the way humans measure movements (in the sense of change from a state to another).
121. Is it possible to know how long the present lasts?
122. While it’s not possible to know how long the present lasts, we can measure how long events that take place in present last.
123. Explaining a discovery is easier than actually discovering something.
124. God’s not in a literal “sky”.
125. God creates the sky twice in Genesis, but Augustine says that the first sky is the Heaven, where God inhabits, with the second sky being the one above our heads.
126. Genesis can not be understood in a single way, so it’s natural that people would arrive at different conclusions about it.
127. “God’s spirit floated over the water”, but there’s no mention in the Genesis about where that water came from (Genesis 1:1-2).
128. To understand creation isn’t the same as understanding what Moses wrote.
129. We can’t verify which interpretation of Genesis is correct.
130. It’s only natural for different people to arrive at different conclusions about the same text.
131. What you conclude from a text can change as you grow older.
132. Even if something can exist without having a shape, you can’t give a shape to something that does not exist.
133. Weight not always pulls an object down (for example, if something is lighter than the air, it will float).
134. God gifts people with abilities that are useful to the community.
135. If you aren’t aggressive, you will likely be loved.
136. You can’t take the Genesis literally.
137. It’s hard for non-intellectual people to appreciate spiritual or intellectual things.
138. A text that doesn’t expresses it’s ideas using time measures (past, present, future) won’t be understood.
139. Worshiping is thanking.

Notes on “The Tranquility of the Soul”.

“The Tranquility of the Soul” was written by Sêneca. Below are some statements made in that book. They are not citations. Questions can be asked in the comments.

1. If you feel temptation, that’s because you are giving effort into resisting.
2. Good intentions can stand between you and virtue.
3. Tranquility is the feeling of having nothing to worry about.
4. To seek tranquility is to seek a state of having no pain, nor strong emotions.
5. You shouldn’t have many aspirations and desires.
6. If you have many desires, you are likely to be frustrated many times.
7. You won’t be able to reach happiness wihtout feeling satisfied with yourself first.
8. Learn to endure, when such is needed.
9. Be useful to yourself and others.
10. The universe is your nation.
11. You need to balance activity and good rest.
12. We can still be role models, even when mute.
13. Get a job at something you like to do.
14. Never try to do something without wondering if you actually can do it.
15. The evils of the wealth are the worst kind of evil.
16. It’s better to have never been rich than losing your fortune.
17. If money was that good, God would have some.
18. You should only be in debt with yourself.
19. Don’t be crazy for money, but that doesn’t imply having no money.
20. You should spend on useful things, not “cool” things.
21. You should eat when hungry, not for mere pleasure.
22. Don’t buy books if you aren’t going to read them.
23. It’s immoral to use a full bookshelf as decoration.
24. The excess is what turns a behavior into a vice.
25. Bad things happen, they are part of life.
26. You can’t fall in despair without wanting it.
27. Avoid being too ambitious, or you may end up too disappointed.
28. Try to stay calm despite having bad luck.
29. If you accept that you are going to die, then you can accept anything.
30. It’s useless to worry about things that do not depend on us.
31. If you try something, but don’t nurture high hopes about it working, you won’t be disappointed if you fail, but, if it works, the success is sweetened with surprise.
32. Never forget that what happens to others may happen to you.
33. Don’t try to do something that isn’t worth it or that likely won’t work.
34. It’s sad when someone wants to do something, but doesn’t know exactly what they want to do.
35. Gossip is a vice.
36. Don’t make promises.
37. There’s a good side in everything.
38. You can poke fun at the problems you face.
39. When a tragedy happens, you don’t need to react like everyone else.
40. You needn’t to feel bad for someone who isn’t suffering.
41. Omitting isn’t the same as lying.
42. Being alone restores our energy.
43. You should work, but you should also have fun.
44. Working too much harms productivity.
45. Finish what you started.

Notes on “The Republic”.

“A República” was written by Platão. Below are some statements made in that text. They may or may not reflect what I think about this subject. Questions about my personal opinion can be asked in the comments.

1. The aging process kills youthful desires, which enslave the young men.
   
2. Wisdom makes it tolerable to age.
3. If you get you worked for your own money, you will feel how much it’s valuable.
4. The fool, if very attached to material goods, feels despair when death is near, because he doesn’t know the future of his goods and his soul.
5. Justice is not simply speaking the truth and giving someone what’s due…
   
6. Is justice the virtue of caring for friends while harming enemies?
7. If so, justice is useless in times of peace.
8. We don’t always know who are our true friends.
9. Justice implies caring for your enemies too.
10. Justice is not the convenience of the strongest.
11. Being strong doesn’t guarantee that your laws are going to be fair.
12. A ruler doesn’t always know what is in the nation’s best interest.
13. Ruling a nation means acting in the best interest of those who are under your hierarchy.
14. Being unjust is profitable, but still wrong.
15. Being unjust implies a degree of ignorance.
16. You can’t practice justice if you are ignorant.
17. Justice enables harmony, while being unjust causes chaos.
18. An unjust person beings harm to themselves, as no one would trust them.
19. If God is just, you better also be…
20. If you are unjust, you can’t rule your own life with perfection, let alone rule the lives of others.
21. Justice is more useful in a community level, rather than personal level.
22. A person can not live completely alone.
23. The differences between types of people make them more fit for certain roles.
24. No city would be built if we didn’t need each other.
25. The better a community is, the more allies it has.
26. A community can only become interested in art, science or economy after the basic needs (water, food, shelter, health) are sorted out.
27. Excess of resources makes the population ill, as it becomes easier to adopt unhealthy habits.
28. In a community where the desire for futile stuff has become high, resources start to diminish too quickly, creating the need to take what already belongs to other communities.
29. It would be ideal if each person had just one job, that could be executed expertly.
30. Desire to learn already makes you philosopher.
31. There’s good and bad literature, the bad literature being the one that has no contact with reality, that is, a literature that lies to the reader.
32. Fiction counts as bad literature.
33. A religion that teaches that gods can have wars between themselves ends up sanctioning violence between humans (“even gods fight”).
34. Even if those stories had a hidden meaning, nothing can guarantee that a person wouldn’t get the meaning wrong.
35. If a child learns something false, they won’t easily forget.
36. If somehting bad happens, don’t blame the gods.
37. A “real lie” is the one that exploits the listener’s ignorance.
38. Overcoming the fear of death requires fiction writers to not write scary stuff about afterlife, that is, exercise a kind of censorship.
39. Fiction appeals to emotion, harming the full exercise of reason.
40. You can’t go to war if you aren’t ready to die.
41. If you can live without someone, you don’t need to cry when that person dies.
42. Laughter should also be avoided.
43. The government can lie, but only if the lie is told on the population’s best interest.
44. Fiction writers shouldn’t write bad things about gods or heroes, to not encourage bad behavior among normal humans who see gods and heroes as role models.
45. There should have no sad music.
46. There should have no calm music.
47. There should have a list of allowed musical instruments and a list of banned musical techniques.
48. Other artist should abide to those restrictions, not only writers and composers.
49. Music has educational value too.
50. Real love isn’t lust.
51. It’s wise to improve your body as well as your mind.
52. A warrior needs it’s own diet.
53. A good diet is supposed to be simple.
    
54. If there is a great demand for doctors it is because there are a lot of ill people.
55. It’s shameful to need doctors to treat self-inflicted illnesses and injuries.
56. A judge must be able to recognize an unjust act without acting against justice himself.
57. Physical education has the role of keeping the body in shape, so that people wouldn’t need doctors so often.
58. Physical education (gymnastics) must be practiced alongside music, as physical education alone could make a person turn “brute” and music alone could make the person too soft.
59. A warrior needs to stay firm in what he believes.
60. A warrior needs to live off state, rather than having own properties, so he can fully commit to his job.
61. Community happiness comes first, personal happiness comes second.
62. A person shouldn’t be wealthy to the point of not needing to have a role in society.
63. Excess of wealth causes temptation to work less.
64. You shouldn’t be filthy rich, but shouldn’t be dirt poor either.
65. There should be no marriage.
66. Four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation, justice.
67. Every ruler must be wise and moderated, while the ruled people must be courageous and moderated.
68. Jobs come in four kinds: manufacturer, warrior, ruler and merchant.
69. It’s just to exercise the work that you are most useful at, rather than exercising many jobs or hopping from one to another.
70. Sciences are separated from each other due to intimate differences, which appear when humans start to focus on a different object.
71. The soul is divided in three parts: reason, emotion and appetite.
72. A person is just when reason dominates emotion, which dominates appetite.
73. Women should receive the same education as men.
74. No such thing as “man’s job” or “woman’s job”, but each person must pick the job they are most useful at.
75. There are laws that go against nature.
76. Nuclear family must be abolished.
77. State must interfere in sexual relationships in order to guarantee that the next generation will be better than the previous.
78. A person must deserve the right to reproduce based on how useful they are to the community.
79. Children are raised by state.
80. A woman should feed random children, rather than electing one (her own child).
81. Age of consent: 20 for women, 30 for men.
82. Procreation must be authorized by state first.
83. Children see older people as “dad” and “mom”, even if they aren’t biologically so.
84. Children should watch the war.
85. Children, before going to watch the war, must be taught to flee.
86. Soldiers who are taken captive shouldn’t be rescued.
87. Science is a discourse about how things truly are, while opinion is a discourse about how things seem to be.
88. The philosopher looks for stable knowledge, one that doesn’t change with time.
89. If you love wisdom, you are likely virtuous.
90. A philosopher isn’t afraid of dying.
91. Because most people are dumb, philosophers are seldom heard, making them almost completely useless for state and public life.
92. A philosopher who ends up preaching a stupid idea probably had a philosophical nature that was perverted by poor education.
93. Philosophy is dangerous for status quo.
94. The philosopher should rule the nation.
95. If a group of philosophers takes control over the nation, it would still take some time for the new laws to appear.
96. Laws shouldn’t be made in a rush.
97. A ruler who is dumb or doesn’t love his people must be impeached.
98. A ruler should be able to enjoy studying, or isn’t fit for the task.
99. A philosopher must be both wise and healthy.
100. If something isn’t good, we wouldn’t want it, unless we mistook it for good.
101. “Good” and “pleasant” aren’t the same, although they can overlap in a same object.
102. You can find pleasure in doing something bad.
103. If you can speak about what other people think, you are supposed to be able to speak about what you think as well.
104. Science and truth are siblings.
105. You can put your thoughts in a scale of clarity, from most obscure to clearest: I suppose (most obscrure), I believe, I understand, I know (clearest).
106. Appearance is misleading, so you can’t judge an object from it’s appearance.
107. Practicing science can be confusing, to the point of causing a person to regret practicing it.
108. The wise feels pity on the ignorant.
109. The wise man may behave pathetically in public life.
110. Nevertheless, the wise man should not isolate himself from others.
111. Education is to turn the student’s soul towards truth, rather than opinion.
112. A philospher must worry about the others as well, not only about himself.
113. The philosopher must use opinions as pedagogical resource.
114. Everyone should know math, even soldiers.
115. If you want to reach the truth, you can’t do so without calculation.
116. Math should be taught in school as mandatory class.
117. Geometry can completely change the way you analyze things.
118. Astronomy can also be useful for everyone.
119. Imperfect study shouldn’t be encouraged.Calculus, geometry, astronomy and dialetics are responsible for turning a person away from opinion and towards the truth.
120. You can not learn dialetics without learning mathematics first.
121. Exact sciences are universally valid.
122. Philosophy’s bad reputation comes from those who practice it without being prepared or without having talent, that is, people who are bad at it.
123. Children should learn math by playing games, as it’s easier for them to remember what they learned with pleasure.
124. Learning dialetics at an young age can make a person turn rebellious, because the youth will notice that many things he used to believe are incorrect, causing hatred towards society.
125. Dialetics can only be taught to people with a stable mind.
126. Women can rule the state, if they are fit for the job.
127. No human government lasts forever.
128. An oligarchy is a form of government exercised only by rich people, who use the poor as resource poll.
129. Wealth and virtue generally go into different directions.
130. The problem with oligarchy is that rich people are often terrible rulers.
131. Plus, poor people and wealthy people sometimes conspirate against each other.
132. Oligarchs sell public goods, empoverish their territories and attract bad reputation.
133. A state with too many poor people is a state with too many crimes, both perpretated by poor and wealthy people.
134. An ignorant person prefers money over dignity.
135. People’s rebellion can turn an oligarchy into a democracy.
136. The election of better qualified people can turn a democracy into an aristocracy.
137. Democracies highly regard freedom.
138. A tyrant needs to ensure that people will need him.
139. A tyrant needs war.
140. A tyrant’s need for war makes him hated by his people.
141. A tyrant needs to kill those who oppose to him.
142. To control his own territory, a tyrant may need help from other nations.
143. A tyrant uses public wealth to reinforce his army, thus defending himself.
144. Everyone has wild, irrational desires.
145. We often dream about them.
146. A tyrant is defenseless without servants.
147. Some people think that something is only worth being done if it brings them money.
148. Under a philosopher’s guidance, people can better conduct their ambition and desire for money.
149. Impulse and desire must be moderated, but never eliminated.
150. Money and power can’t compensate a soul’s decadence.
151. Beautiful lies can destroy a person’s intelligence.
152. An artisan makes physical objects using a mental model as base.
153. If someone seems to know everything, they are lying.
154. Fiction is a lie and should be treated as such, that is, shouldn’t be taken seriously.
155. Falsifications are a toy or a game; believing something false as if it was true is silly.
156. Reason should moderate suffering.
157. Emotion is what makes us feel despair.
158. Emotion harms the free use of reason.
159. Suffering excessively isn’t masculine.
160. The more you laugh, the harder it will be to contain your laughter next time you see something funny.
161. The body can only die from age, illness or physical damage.