Music assures us that we are not alone: that there is something out there in the world that knows our hearts and may even teach us to know them better. Thanks to music, we experience what it means to be connected to the whole of all things. “Music, too, is nature.” —Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and [...]
So there are, at least in my experience, not many books that deal with the question “What’s the good of justice?” But there is one that deals with it preeminently. It is the mother of all books on constitution-making, on governance and education, on psychology, on the routes of moral decline, on the role of [...]
As grand strategy evolves in America’s ongoing democratic political process, the essence of the Plato Doctrine will be preserved in any new formulation of a national security doctrine, because such is the nature of human political life… I have argued that there is no Platonic teaching of a “noble lie,” but rather of “some one [...]
Great nations need organizing principles, and the forthright articulation of a Trump Doctrine will define the future of U.S. foreign policy—if Plato’s advice about the people’s consent is followed… Looking ahead to what will be the most defining feature of the Trump administration, Pat Buchanan has noted that it is “Time for a Trump Doctrine.” [...]
The phrase “noble lie” does not even occur in the text of Plato’s Republic. So how have scholars come to misunderstand what Plato means in his discussion of the city’s need for a doctrine to guide its politics? What did Plato actually teach in the Republic about the so-called “noble lie?” For convenience, I shall refer to [...]
When I first discovered Plato, I was delighted to learn that philosophy could be exciting, rather than boring. I learned that Plato wrote eloquently in praise of divine madness. Eros is recognized by many to be a form of madness, and yet without eros how can one be propelled aloft on the quest for wisdom? [...]
Calls for “social justice” have a bad habit of appearing in caricature: the throwback hippiedom of Occupy Wall Street, the race-baiting rallies of Al Sharpton and other hucksters, the abortion proponents who think the First Amendment was written to protect their “right” to dress up as genitalia. If ever “social justice” was a content-rich term, [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Fr. James Schall as he contemplates the similarities between the death of Plato and the death of one of Plato’s more recent scholars, Eric Voegelin. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher But there is another sort of old age too: the tranquil and [...]
Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgia, by Nalin Ranasinghe (192 pages, St. Augustine Press, 2009) Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Peter Augustine Lawler as he reflects on how Socrates models both rightly-ordered eros and logos, in contrast to the Stoics and Sophists. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher [...]
Despite the advent of relativity, quantum physics, and chaos theory, most scientists, including most physicists, intellectually inhabit the Newtonian Cosmos. In stark contrast to the Aristotelian Cosmos, where plants and animals possess an inner agency that causes them to emulate the Prime Mover, the Newtonian Cosmos is mechanical, where lifeless matter as well as animate [...]
II The related problems of “the public orthodoxy” and “the open society” were major concerns of Willmoore Kendall throughout his professional career. In his reappraisal of John Locke in 1941, Kendall’s Locke emerged as an exponent of the public orthodoxy as expressed through the majority. As Kendall sees it, in Lockean thought, “In consenting to be a member [...]
IV M.E. Bradford The principle underlying the Agrarian-New Critic’s position as literary critic, shared generally in the New Critical movement at large, may be simply put: Some poems are better than other poems. He judges them as things existing in themselves, made by that intellectual creature—man. The problem term, of course, is better, since it commits intellect, willy [...]
Music, as a living presence that comes to us, offers itself to us, assures us that we are not alone: that there is something out there in the world that knows our hearts and may even teach us to know them better. Music, too, is nature. —Victor Zuckerkandl, Sound and Symbol. This essay explores the [...]
G.K. Chesterton was once asked what he would most like to have with him if he found himself marooned on a desert island. He replied, somewhat whimsically, that he’d like to have a book on practical shipbuilding. In this, if not in too much else, I’d like to beg to differ with the great man. [...]