“In tranquility he becomes a sage, and in activity he becomes a king.”
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.)
“The good person is related to his friend as to himself, for his friend is another self.”
Mencius (c. 372–289 B.C.E.)
“Humanity subdues inhumanity as water subdues fire.”
Epicurus (341–270 B.C.E.)
“Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.”
Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.)
“There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.”
Lucretius (c. 98–55 B.C.E.)
“It is more useful to watch a man in times of peril, and in adversity to discern what kind of man he is; for then, at last, words of truth are drawn from the depths of his heart, and the mask is torn off, reality remains.”
Seneca (c. 4 B.C.E.–65 A.D.)
“Fate leads the willing, and drags along the unwilling.”
Epictetus (50–130)
“Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.”
Marcus Aurelius (121–180)
“He who acts unjustly acts unjustly to himself, because he makes himself bad.”
Augustine (354–430)
“O love, you ever burn and are never extinguished.”
Boethius (c. 480–524)
“Just as knowledge of present things does not impose necessity on the things being done, neither does foreknowledge of future things impose necessity in the things to come.”
Anselm (1033–1109)
“You exist so truly, Lord my God, that You cannot even be thought not to exist.”
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111)
“I learnt with certainty that it is above all the mystics who walk on the road of God.”
Moses Maimonides (1135–1204)
“Know that in every man there is necessarily the faculty of courage.”
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)
“The love of God is better than the knowledge of God.”
Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527)
“God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.”
Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
“A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
“There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear.”
René Descartes (1596–1650)
“Reading good books is like having a conversation with the most distinguished men of past ages.”
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“The heart has its reasons of which reason does not know.”
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677)
“All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.”
John Locke (1632–1704)
“It is enough to justify the fitness of anything to be done by resolving it into “the wisdom of God,” who has done it, though our short views and narrow understandings may utterly incapacitate us to see that wisdom and to judge rightly of it.”
Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716)
“The supreme wisdom, united to a goodness that is no less infinite, cannot but have chosen the best . . . So it may be said that if this were not the best of all possible worlds, God would not have created any.”
George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.”
Voltaire (1694–1778)
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”
David Hume (1711–1776)
“Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
“Let us set down as an incontestable maxim that the first movements of nature are always right. There is no original perversity in the human heart.”
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as determine what we shall do.”
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1851)
“How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to render ourselves gentle, domestic brutes!”
G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831)
“We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860)
“In the end everyone stands alone, and the important thing is, who it is that stands alone.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.”
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
“Without risk there is no faith.”
Henry David Thoreau (1813–1862)
“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, or even to found a school, but to so love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.”
Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, what matters is to change it.”
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by truth.”
William James (1842–1910)
“Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Live dangerously.”
John Dewey (1859–1952)
“We only think when we are confronted by a problem.”
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947)
“Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.”
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
“Hatred has become the rule of life, and injury to others is more desired than benefit to ourselves.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
“You do not get to philosophy by reading many and multifarious philosophical books, nor by torturing yourself with solving the riddles of the universe . . . Philosophy remains latent in every human existence and need not be first added to it from somewhere else.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)
“If you love long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.”
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“The connotation of courage, which we now feel to be an indispensable quality of the hero, is in fact already present in a willingness to act and speak at all, to insert one’s self into the world and begin a story of one’s own.”
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986)
“Man is defined as a human being and woman as a female—whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male.”
Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
The Fellowship of the Book
GREGORY BASSHAM is Director o
f the Center for Ethics and Public Life and Chair of the Philosophy Department at King’s College, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Original Intent and the Constitution: A Philosophical Study (Rowman and Littlefield, 1992) and co-author of Critical Thinking: A Student’s Introduction (McGraw-Hill, 2002). Greg recently gave a talk to his local Teen Chastity League, entitled “Waiting 2,778 Years for Mr. Right: The Arwen Undómiel Story.”
DOUGLAS K. BLOUNT is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has published articles on philosophical theology and public policy issues. He currently spends his idle hours working on two manuscripts, Ecce Hobbit and Thus Spake Gandalf. Though he has been known to enjoy a second breakfast on occasion, he is only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all.
ERIC BRONSON heads the Philosophy and History Department at Berkeley College in New York City. Currently, he is editing the forthcoming book, Baseball and Philosophy (Open Court, 2004), and co-writing the short film, Ruckus! with Dean Ishida (Farouche Films). While Eric appreciates Bilbo’s dictum that “Not all those who wander are lost,” his own life fails to corroborate that maxim.
B. STEVE CSAKI is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Instructor of Japanese at Centre College. He has published articles and presented papers on comparative philosophy, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism. While Steve plays the role of the philosopher farmer, he is haunted by the fact that he is forever too short to play basketball and too tall for the Shire.
JOHN J. DAVENPORT is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He has published articles on free will, existentialism, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of religion, and recently co-edited the collection, Kierkegaard After MacIntyre (Open Court, 1999) with Anthony Rudd. John likes to spend his time in the Ivory Tower of Orthanc peering into his palantír to see whether his students are doing their assigned reading.
BILL DAVIS is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Covenant College. He has contributed chapters on philosophical theology to Reason for the Hope Within (Eerdmans, 1999) and Beyond the Bounds (Crossways, 2003), as well as the entry on Thomas Reid for The Encyclopedia of Empiricism. Bill’s beard and a broad-bladed axe are often found tucked in his belt.
SCOTT A. DAVISON earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in philosophy from Ohio State University before completing a second M.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. He is currently an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Morehead State University in Kentucky. Scott’s insight into the nature of evil is based not only on philosophical research, but also on extensive “field work” involving the method of “participant observation.”
JORGE J.E. GRACIA holds the Samuel P. Capen Chair and is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University at Buffalo. He is author of twelve books, including Individuality (1988), Philosophy and Its History (1992), A Theory of Textuality (1995), Texts (1996), Metaphysics and Its Task (1999), How Can We Know What God Means? (2000), and Hispanic/Latino Identity (2000). He hopes to find the Ring some day and keeps looking for it in and around Niagara Falls.
THOMAS HIBBS is Dean of the Honors College and Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Culture at Baylor University. He has published two books on Aquinas, a book on philosophy and pop culture (Shows about Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture), and is at work on a book on film noir. Hibbs’s greatest discovery as a young philosophy student was that Guinness comes in pints.
ERIC KATZ is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is the author of Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997) and the co-editor of three books on environmental ethics and the philosophy of technology. Eric tells his students that professors are never late. They arrive precisely when they mean to.
JOE KRAUS is Assistant Professor of English at King’s College. He is the co-author of An Accidental Anarchist (Academy Chicago, 2001), and has published several articles on ethnic literature and history, particularly on the figure of the gangster. After he looked into Galadriel’s mirror, he realized that he desperately needed a shave.
ANDREW LIGHT is Assistant Professor of Environmental Philosophy at New York University, and Research Fellow at the Institute for Environment, Philosophy and Public Policy at Lancaster University, England. He is the author of Reel Arguments: Film, Philosophy, and Social Criticism (Westview, 2003), and has edited or co-edited thirteen books on environmental ethics, philosophy of technology, and aesthetics, including Technology and the Good Life? (University of Chicago Press, 2000), The Aesthetics of Everyday Life (Seven Bridges, 2003), and Moral and Political Reasoning in Environmental Practice (MIT Press, 2003). Andrew has been known to shout, “Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion!” at committee meetings.
JENNIFER L. MCMAHON is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Program at Centre College. She has published articles on Sartre, Eastern philosophy, and aesthetics. Claiming to be a descendent of the Rohirrim, Jennifer epitomizes Sartre’s notion of bad faith when she attributes her tendency to amass horses to a genetic predisposition.
ALISON MILBANK is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia and author of Daughters of the House: Modes of the Gothic in Victorian Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 1992) and Dante and the Victorians (Manchester University Press, 1999); she has also edited two novels by Ann Radcliffe. She is currently completing book-length studies on Gothic, Sacrifice, and the Modern and Tolkien and Christianity. Alison was born in the Shire and left by the firth of Lune to find her way to Valinor, but ended up in America instead.
THEODORE SCHICK, JR. is Professor of Philosophy at Muhlenberg College and co-author (with Lewis Vaughn) of How to Think about Weird Things (McGraw-Hill, third edition 2003), and Doing Philosophy (McGraw-Hill, second edition 2002). His most recent book is Readings in the Philosophy of Science: from Positivism to Postmodernism (McGraw-Hill, 1999). He trims his toe hairs to hobbit length.
AEON J. SKOBLE is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bridgewater State College. He is co-editor of the anthology Political Philosophy: Essential Selections (Prentice-Hall, 1999), co-editor of The Simpsons and Philosophy (Open Court, 2001), and co-editor of the forthcoming Woody Allen and Philosophy (Open Court, 2004). He writes on moral, political, and social theory for both scholarly and lay journals, and is editor of the annual journal Reason Papers. Aeon plans to live to the ripe old age of eleventy-one and then vanish.
J. LENORE WRIGHT is Assistant Director of the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core and an affiliated faculty member of the Philosophy Department at Baylor University. Her research interests include aesthetics and art criticism, philosophy and popular culture, and film theory. Her most recent publications are “Socrates at the Cinema: Using Film in the Philosophy Classroom,” co-authored with Anne-Marie Bowery, in Teaching Philosophy (March 2003) and “The Wonder of Barbie: Female Representation in Popular Culture,” in Essays in Philosophy (January 2003). Lenore regularly feels the Eye of Sauron upon her and has recurrent nightmares about Ringwraiths and orcs. Her husband has heard her mumbling in her sleep, “my precious, my precious tenure.”
The Wizard’s Index
abnegation, 98
Ackerman, Diane, 58
Adam and Eve, 103, 104n. 6
Adams, Douglas, 133
Adimantus, 7
Aeneid, The (Virgil), 179, 213–14
afterlife. See immortality, in The Lord of the Rings
Ainur, 74, 206, 213
Albert the Great, 201
Al-Ghazali, 132
alienation, 37
Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Alighieri
allegory, in The Lord of the Rings, 21–22, 80–81, 151, 193, 204
Aman, 34, 42, 44, 124, 126, 132–34
Ambrose, St., 195, 201
Amon Hen, 11, 16
Anduin, 141–42
Apology (Plato), 128
&nbs
p; Aquinas, Thomas, 132
Aragorn, 5, 11, 15, 55, 61, 68, 73, 112, 130, 137, 146, 147, 171, 176, 177, 186, 187, 198, 201
and Arwen, 35, 82, 123–25, 135–36
contrasted with Boromir, 115–16
death of, 136
as King Elessar, 145, 147, 198
and the Ring, 115–16
and the sapling of Nimloth, 217–18
Arda, 124
Arendt, Hannah, 77, 79–80, 201
Ariadne, 201
Aristotle, 62, 110–16, 118, 132, 201
on friendship, 54, 70
on happiness, 63–64, 126
on tragedy, 99
on virtue, 110ff.
Arthurian legends, 205n. 2
Arwen, 35, 42, 54, 82, 123–25, 126, 134–36
Asimov, Isaac, 21, 25
Atani, 74
atomic bomb, and the Ring, 25
Auden, W.H., 213
Augustine, St., 53, 58, 102, 103, 107, 108, 131, 174, 194–95, 201
Aule, 154n. 4
Aurelius, Marcus, 53
Bagginses. See Bilbo; Frodo
Baldur, 40
Balin, 152
Balrog, 96, 130, 143, 177, 198
Barad-dûr, 18, 54, 70, 216
Barrow-downs, 156
Barrow-wights, 15, 95
Beare, Rhona, 2
beauty, 56–57, 91
Beauty and the Beast (fairy tale), 208
beer, in The Lord of the Rings, 49, 55
Bentham, Jeremy, 117
Beowulf, 40, 41, 80, 205
Beren, 214, 216
Berman, Marshall, 139–140, 146
Bert (troll), 89
Bertilak, Sir, 211–12
Bilbo, 28, 41, 63, 89, 95, 107, 177, 178, 195,
birthday party, 39–40, 41
and dwarves, 95
as mentor, 186
and pity, 96, 215–16
and riddle–game
and the Ring, 35, 71, 115, 137, 169, 174, 196
on Rivendell, 73
and Smaug, 61
as teacher of Sam, 144
and Thorin, 106–07
and trolls, 89
as tutor to Sam, 144
Bill (the pony), 95
biological weapons, 30
Black Gate, 9
Black Riders. See Ringwraiths
Blanchett, Cate, 75
Blessed Realm. See Aman
The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy Page 25