Eco-Republic:What the Ancients Can Teach Us about Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living by Melissa Lane In this provocative and accessible reflection on the potential contributions of Platonic political thought to the resolution of contemporary environmental problems, Lane (Princeton) attempts to craft “an intuitive and imaginative model inspired by the ancients” (p. 6). As a work in [...]
Plato’s Republic: A Study, by Stanley Rosen Plato’s Republic, Stanley Rosen says at the beginning of his book, is “both excessively familiar and inexhaustibly mysterious.” Thus it invites ever more interpretations, not, I think, by reason of any willful indeterminacy or woolly grandeur on Plato’s part, but because a false sense of knowing the work [...]
Today, Allan Bloom’s unlikely 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind is in some ways truer and more moving than ever. I have just taught the book in a class (one that began by reading Tocqueville) filled mostly with very smart yet still overachieving Evangelical students. They eagerly embraced the book as evidence of [...]
Socrates Despite decades of “critical thinking,” the anecdotal and statistical evidence is that Americans in general, and Christians in particular, have an aversion for thinking. In a recent article, the evidence is that many, if not most students, simply do not want to think. In truth, the students are merely mirroring the broader [...]
As that beautiful and intellectual force of nature, Annette Kirk, has mentioned in conversation many times, Russell was an Augustinian, and she was a Thomist. She was also more Aristotelian and he more Platonic. In one of his most under-appreciated works (now, perhaps, more necessary to republish than ever), Decadence and Renewal in the Higher [...]
Socrates: "Friend Pan and however many other gods are here, grant me to become beautiful in respect to the things within. And as to whatever things I have outside, grant that they be friendly to the things inside me. May I believe the wise man to be rich. May I have as big a mass [...]
Plato Gentlemen of the jury, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to anyone of [...]