I am pleased to join you in your conference focusing on the development of judgment in our young people today. I have been giving some special thought lately to the question of how one might develop a capacity for sound judgment and a desire to build good character through the exercise of the imagination—that is [...]
Chapter One in The Young Man’s Guide to Building a House Experts in this sort of thing tell us that there are three tasks you must perform in order to survive in the wilderness. They even give us some helpful deadlines—dead being brutally factual in this case. In ascending order here they are: you have [...]
It is my pleasure to be able to introduce Nalin Ranasinghe’s Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgias to you as one of the most able, eloquent, noble, profound, and loving books ever written on Socrates. Ranasinghe restores for us the example of a moral hero who inaugurated a moral revolution in opposition to his [...]
The wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine, and which by nature tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods. The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the wing of the soul [...]
Eric Voegelin was charmed by the death of Plato. Philosophy, Voegelin thought, had fled to the Academy—Plato’s Academy not ours—wherein poetry and the pleasure of music are received back no longer tainted by the polis using them for its own purposes. “But there is another sort of old age too: the tranquil and serene evening [...]
Radical egalitarianism in a democracy leads to mob rule, which leads to tyranny. So it happened in Ancient Athens, and so might it happen in America today. Most Americans take for granted that democracy is an absolute good. If it can be said of an idea or a program that it promotes equality, Americans, whatever [...]
I have been reminiscing lately, probably a sign of my age, but I came to recall an episode in my earlier life before I returned to St. John’s College more than 20 years ago, when my second son announced: “Dad, I’m willing to talk with you about my college choices, but I’m not going to go [...]
The parallels between the Mumford & Sons song “The Cave” and the Platonic story are impossible to miss. I am not someone who should ever review music, my tastes being without pattern when they exist at all. But, my students and an old friend have recently introduced me to a very intriguing band who released their second [...]
Socrates, who lived from 470 to 399 B.C., is separated from us by nearly two and one half millennia. This means that he had not in common with our progressive age the automobile, the aeroplane, the television, the computer, the telephone (whether cellular or regular), video games, virtual reality, etc. Can we, then, “relate” to [...]
The purpose of this essay is to elucidate the importance of Plato’s commitment to rational discourse in the Apology and Gorgias. Both dialogues chronicle the transfer of authority from the destructive world of Athens to the philosophers. The organization of politics and society, according to Plato, is determined by the orderliness of the souls of its citizens. The central [...]
What does it mean to teach in an age of ideology? At first glance, especially for conservatives, the answer appears to be obvious: to advocate for conservative ideas and principles against the prevailing ideologies of relativism, feminism, multiculturalism, and other “politically correct” dogmas that dominate the institutions of American higher education today. Alternatively, if you [...]
Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught? [to continue] Or if not teachable, is it acquired by practice, or if neither, whether men possess it by nature or in some other way?” So begins Plato’s dialogue, Meno, opening as abruptly upon the reader as my remarks have upon you this afternoon. You [...]
There comes a time in every year when I find myself saying to a friend or a prospective student that this is a very musical College [Ed., Convocation, St. John’s College, 2011]. After 20 years of speaking this way, I thought I should ask myself just what I mean by this statement, and so I will [...]
The topic “Politics and the Imagination” is at once larger and more restricted than “Politics and the Arts,” the theme of this Tocqueville Forum. It is more restricted because I mean to exclude the practical problem of the relation between the arts and public life. Indeed, by politics I mean here not the working processes [...]