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Dear Cindy You certainly have made my Sunday evening. Rossi - the greatest 500CC/Moto GP rider of modern times - fell of his motorbike and the wrong team won the Australian Rugby League Grand Final. So your email has sparked me up. Muhammad Ali is, of course, one of the few body philosophers - and probably the best I will ever see. I love to watch his fights and pick the point where the fight turns. I remember listening, on radio, to a stupid fight he had with a kickboxer - Ali won - the fight was strange - I said, after the fight, the only thing left for Ali to do, would be to kill a man in the ring - he had walked through himself in Zen terms - that is, there was no oponent left for him to fight. In an interview, after the fight, Ali commented that the fight felt like killing a man. It was like that, even on radio - I've never seen footage of this fight (did I dream it?). There is something like Hemingway and the bullfighter going on with Ali. Duendea is Garcia Lorca's term for this kind of bodily knowledge. It was certainly known to the ancient Greeks. A Judo teacher who taught one of my sons tells a story of going on to a mat in Japan where an old man was throwing people. My son's teacher (a black belt), decades younger, went up against the old man and was promptly thrown. He had great pleasure in being thrown so comprehensivly by an opponent who understood duendea. The younger man got himself off the mat and he laughed very happily. It is such fun to be thrown so and to know the throw and not resist it. It would be magnificent to be floored by Ali. This also happens, for me, with great philsophers - they floor me and I get up laughing. If only the enemies of Socrates had been able to find the fun in being thrown so. Their complaint, in the Meno, is that Socrates is like the Torpedo Fish (sting ray) - he puts his opponent into a torpor. In a sense this is correct. Plato tries to relieve this "drugged state" by offering what I call the"Platonic Method" otherwise known as the hypothetical approach. For Plato we need to get further than disputes about whether 1 + 1 = 2 or not. I am happy to discuss whether and how 1 + 1 might = 2. I am also happy to move on and see where we get when we allow that 1 + 1 = 2 makes sense in some sense. Shifting between these modes is shifting between Socrates and Plato. For me, Socrates likes the fun of throwing and Plato likes the fun of getting up laughing. all the best throwing and laughing keith russell OZ newcastle >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Cindy Jackson wrote: My all-time favorite is Keith Russell. As a philosophy major in college, I developed a taste for sly puzzles and sparkling footwork. If Muhammad Ali had been a philosopher, he would have been Keith Russell. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>