Turning the Whole Soul: The Moral Journey of the Philosophic Nature in Plato’s “Republic”

By |2024-03-17T16:52:56-05:00March 17th, 2024|Categories: Andrew Seeley, Culture, Education, Philosophy, Plato, Socrates, Timeless Essays|

According to Socrates, to save Philosophy, to save young souls destined for greatness, to save human society itself, the true, philosophic nature must be freed from the corruptive influences that have formed him and receive the best education. The soul must be turned around. I forgot that we were playing and spoke rather intensely. For, [...]

Image, Being, & Form in the Platonic Dialogues

By |2023-06-26T16:55:38-05:00June 26th, 2023|Categories: Books, E.B., Eva Brann, Featured, Jacob Klein, Plato, Senior Contributors, Socrates, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Modernity is best apprehended as being in a ruptured continuum with Greek antiquity—a continuum insofar as the terms persist, ruptured insofar as they take on new meanings and missions. That perspective makes those who hold it avid participants in the present. Jacob Klein was in the last year of his nine-year tenure as dean of [...]

Caves, Happiness, and Liberal Learning

By |2023-06-12T17:38:40-05:00June 11th, 2023|Categories: Eva Brann, Liberal Learning, Plato, Socrates, St. John's College, W. Winston Elliott III|

If Plato’s extended metaphor of the mind as depicted by the city is true, every human mind has the capacity to train its Guardians, curb the appetitive part of the soul, and live on the grassy plains in the sun above the cave. It’s a question of true learning. When Eva Brann describes a liberal [...]

A Backwards Civilization: Unthinking Leaders, Frenzied Citizens

By |2023-02-07T17:08:49-06:00February 7th, 2023|Categories: Civil Society, Civilization, Democracy, Featured, Meno, Modernity, Plato, Political Philosophy, Politics, Socrates, Timeless Essays|

In America today, we are living in a toxic political climate that is the product of a very dangerous combination: Our rulers lack the learning necessary to ask the kinds of deep and fundamental questions that leaders and lawgivers ought to make a habit of pondering, while our people rebelliously scrutinize all orthodoxies and impose [...]

Plato’s “Timaeus” and the Will to Order

By |2022-11-11T22:08:39-06:00November 11th, 2022|Categories: Books, Classics, Featured, Peter Kalkavage, Philosophy, Plato, Socrates, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Plato, through the drama of the “Timaeus,” reminds us of the dangers of being human as well as the dangers of philosophy. Danger and safety, perhaps the most central terms of the Platonic dramas, become central because of Plato’s care for what we do and what we suffer. And whoever thinks another a greater friend [...]

A Socratic Response to Revelation

By |2022-10-11T08:19:34-05:00October 10th, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Philosophy, Reason, Socrates|

A truly Socratic response to revelation—passive surprise, perplexed skepticism, clarifying refutation, heroic confirmation, relative exceptionalism, creative revision, and persistent service—offers us, perhaps, a way out of the cultural impasse we are in. The parties of reason and revelation seldom treat one another well: Those fond of reason all too often do not believe in revelation [...]

Can Socrates Change Your Life?

By |2022-10-02T20:18:09-05:00October 2nd, 2022|Categories: Christianity, Featured, Philosophy, Plato, Politics, Socrates, Timeless Essays, Truth, Virtue|

If Socrates reveals anything about the moral life, it is how uncertain and unstable it is without grounding in knowledge of the Good; and yet he confesses that such grounding is beyond his reach, beyond the reach of human reason itself to attain. In this way Socrates reveals the genuine problem of moral relativity that [...]

Socrates’ Ethics

By |2022-09-21T16:29:17-05:00September 21st, 2022|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, Cicero, Philosophy, Senior Contributors, Socrates, Western Civilization|

Though we often associate the Greeks with the “order of the mind,” we should note that Socrates had a deeply spiritual and theological side, which embraced divine reason as the language of the living and the dead. When someone—and, in 2022, it’s likely nearly everyone in the world of academia and in the world at [...]

The Trials and Death of Socrates

By |2022-08-22T17:23:36-05:00August 22nd, 2022|Categories: Apology, Christopher B. Nelson, Classics, Crito, Liberal Learning, Phaedo, Socrates, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

The body of Socrates may be gone but the Real Socrates has stayed with Phaedo, his friends and with all of us who will take up a life devoted to philosophy. I am grateful for the opportunity to have reflected on the life of Socrates as I wrote this evening’s lecture. Of course, it’s not [...]

Fit for the World

By |2022-05-14T11:07:02-05:00May 14th, 2022|Categories: Antigone, Apology, Graduation, Great Books, Humanities, Liberal Arts, Liberal Learning, Plato, Socrates, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

Your world needs you; it needs your desire to understand it, your openness to what it has to teach you, your acceptance of its imperfections, and your sincere wish and best efforts to be useful to it because you care for it as it has cared for you, however unconscious that care may have been. [...]

‘A Breeze Bringing Health’

By |2022-04-22T11:43:43-05:00April 22nd, 2022|Categories: Glenn Arbery, Great Books, Plato, Senior Contributors, Socrates, Wyoming Catholic College|

For Socrates, the best city will “track down the nature of what is fine and graceful, so that the young, dwelling as it were in a healthy place, will be benefited by everything. And from that place something of the fine works will strike their vision or their hearing, like a breeze bringing health from [...]

Living Well on Earth & Entering Heaven: The Nineteen Types of Judgment

By |2021-08-12T15:12:48-05:00August 10th, 2021|Categories: Christendom, Classics, Liberal Learning, Plato, Reason, Socrates, Timeless Essays|

Making judgments is a privilege of persons only. A privilege that is necessary, both to live well on earth and to enter Heaven. There are at least nineteen different kinds of judgment that we should distinguish. I’m sorry I could not find a twentieth, to match the number of digits on our fingers and toes. But [...]

The Three Great Teachers

By |2021-08-28T09:05:06-05:00June 26th, 2021|Categories: Christianity, Eastern Thought, George Stanciu, Homer, Plato, Religion, Socrates, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, Virtue|

Each great teacher locates the fundamental problem of human living differently: The Buddha cites suffering; Socrates points to ignorance; and Jesus identifies faulty love. In addition, all three Masters teach that the task set for each human soul is to travel from illusion to reality. Unlike the Age of Faith, in Postmodernity, or more accurately [...]

The Imitation of Heroes

By |2021-05-29T05:45:43-05:00May 28th, 2021|Categories: Christopher B. Nelson, Classical Education, Classics, Featured, Liberal Learning, Phaedo, Plato, Socrates, St. John's College, Timeless Essays|

The demise of imitation has been devastating for personal growth. It used to be a commonplace that successful people need to have extraordinary “heroes” whom they admire and try to emulate. But the historical disciplines in the twentieth century waged something of a war against the very idea of the hero. Imitation, like so many [...]

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