The ancient lights Among the countless legacies we have inherited from Greek and Roman civilizations, I would like to speak here about rationality. What is rationality? It is the primacy of reason in human interactions, that is, the necessity of discussing everything, of debating with one goal in mind: not to determine who is right, but to assess the soundness of our arguments, based on logical truths and factual truths.

Perhaps one day I will say how my opponents were particularly useful to me in their own way, despite the challenges imposed, but today I would like to pay tribute to my ten greatest masters who, thanks to their unexpected help, allowed me to cross a sacred obstacle course.

On the 65th anniversary of his death, it may be useful to take stock of his thinking, to ask ourselves how this famous philosopher and novelist would undoubtedly have understood our times, but above all, what we could take away from his work to fill our humanist bag.

The study of an ancient language as an antidote to modern-day loss of reason and totalitarianism? It may seem frivolous, but... From the origin of words to the structure of thought, Latin offers us a veritable arsenal of defense against mental decay.

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in Tuscany, to a notary father and a peasant mother who left her son with his natural father, who raised him along with his nine brothers and two sisters. The mother was forbidden to see her son. His grandfather was also a notary. Leonardo da Vinci did receive an education, but it was very limited: he learned to read in the vernacular and would only study Latin later, as an autodidact. It seems that Tuscan nature served as his mot

Nothing can replace, for the traveler, that feeling of arriving at the end of the world when he sets foot on Providence Island, located in the Caribbean Sea, off the eastern coast of Nicaragua.

Nothing is given, everything is to be conquered, and the aspiration to the sublime is what we are allowed to experience in Florence: time has stopped there on good taste, on beauty "universal and without concept", as Emmanuel Kant would later say.

"In the spring, which suits this city so well that speaks to us of flowers, I decided to come from South America to finally realize an old dream: to reopen, with a group of apprentice philosophers, the Neoplatonic Academy of Marsilio Ficino."

The October Revolution in Russia officially plunged the world into the totalitarian era. It was preceded by an intense political, social, and ideological struggle, spearheaded by terrorism. A "witness to history", imagined by a Russian novelist, revealed the psychology of the young activists who sacrificed themselves to establish a dream of freedom that ended in nightmare. Is it a coincidence that the novel was subtitled "the book of endings"?

The religious fanaticism of adolescents is the hallmark of a societal and political system that has become paranoid, in which the logic of power is harassing and no longer governed by authority. In the suburbs of France, recruitment has been rather successful. It reveals the deep social, familial, and spiritual flaws in the society in which these adolescents grew up.

If terrorism is about terrorizing others, the question arises: who are the real terrorists? And what are they really motivated by?

Marie Antoinette is both the most famous and the most misunderstood queen in the history of France. Born on November 2, 1755, in Vienna, Austria, she died by guillotine on October 16, 1793, in the Place de la Révolution in Paris (now Place de la Concorde). She reigned over France and Navarre from 1774 to 1791 and was Queen of the French from 1791 to 1792, the last queen of the Ancien Régime, Archduchess of Austria, Imperial Princess and Royal Princess of Hungary and Bohemia,

Literature trumps psychology in that it allows us to explore many souls, not just our own. This is Faulkner's proposition, which he illustrates with a captivating and hideous dive into the depths of human nature.

The art of seizing the opportunity is not an exact science. It is not transferable or reproducible according to external criteria, because it calls more on intuition than reason, that quality which creates geniuses, great men, fine strategists, good doctors or even great seducers.

Feelings are shrinking like shagreen leather; no one opens up about their feelings anymore, love is relegated to the cellar, even inner life is no longer of interest. This is Günther Anders's sad observation of the generations before the post-Covid dehumanization...

Gabriel García Márquez was not only the brilliant novelist of One Hundred Years of Solitude and other great works. He wrote many stories, some of which have been published. Among these stories, one has, to my knowledge, never been included in a book. It is entitled Algo muy grave va a suceder en este pueblo: "Something very serious is going to happen in the village."

Can love be commanded? Can it be decided? Gabriel García Márquez has attempted to answer these enigmas, the most bitter of a human life, with a flamboyant novel of almost unbearable passion.

This sentence, taken from his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, seems to have been predestined by Gabriel García Márquez for his novel about the last moments of Simón Bolívar's life, The General in His Labyrinth.

Our era is suffering from an impoverishment of the imagination. The totalitarian drift narrows our relationship to space (e.g., confinements, reductions in travel, under the cover of different ideologies) and to time (e.g., explosion of our relationship to immediacy, under the influence of consumer capitalism and screens). On the contrary, the imagination is this psychic function that allows us to open new horizons and navigate through the centuries.

His prestige is such that all his blunders, his excesses and his faults in taste are seen by the Parisian public as trifles or momentary errors. Ariane Bilheran dares here to deliver an unvarnished portrait of the House of Molière as a pimp of the new ideological prostitution.