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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 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 [...]
In times of chaos, it’s profoundly necessary to remember those who have come before us and the innumerable sacrifices they made. Each of these great men, whatever his individual faults, sought to live according to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. They preserved, and they conserved. As a way of perceiving and a habit [...]
It is the task of the wise ruler to seek to transform the city based on force into one based on speech (if only on myths and noble lies). This is no different for a founder of a community of discourse than for a founder of cities. This is the primary task of the first [...]
Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgias, 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 [...]
We know that Socrates was accused of introducing new gods and of corrupting the youth. But what was Socrates’ true position concerning the gods? Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join the late Nalin Ranasinghe, as he analyzes the essence of piety as expressed in Plato’s Euthyphro. —W. Winston [...]
Twenty-four centuries after his death, the words of Socrates can still unsettle an attentive listener. However, before we can understand his most famous dictum, we must clear away who we are not to grasp who we are—something only done when we are grounded in the fundamental relationships that are universal to humankind. Probably, the most [...]