In Plato's "Republic," Socrates descends to Hades, is caught in conversation in the house of Pluto, and tells down there the story of his own descent. This then is the setting of the "Republic": Hades with its tales and a deliverer willing to go down and able to come up. A. "Socrates begins most of [...]
Between classes at about ten fifteen on the morning of December 12, 1978, Bert Thoms collapsed of a heart attack. He died soon after in the hospital. His colleague and friend, the Reverend F. Winfree Smith, conducted the funeral service in a crowded Great Hall on the morning of December 16, a soft, bright, almost balmy [...]
The quest for elements is the best way we humans have of getting to the roots of things and making sense of our experience. And working at this together, in a community dedicated to learning, is one of the best services we can do, both for our own souls and for those of our fellow [...]
Antigones, by George Steiner (Clarendon Press, 1984; Oxford Paperback, 1986) Anyone who has reread the Antigone about as often as is profitable for the time being might consider turning to this book. The curious plural of its title is glossed on the cover of the paperback: “How the Antigone legend has endured in Western literature and thought.” While [...]
See Naples: A Memoir of Love, Peace, and War in Italy, by Douglas Allanbrook, A Peter Davison Book, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York and Boston, 1995, 269 pp. Douglas Allanbrook came to St. John’s, Annapolis in 1952, in his early thirties. It was here that his two sons were born, Timothy and John, to whom [...]
The subtitle of my talk might be “Liberal Education: Program and/or Pedagogy?” The reason is that I think of Jacob Klein’s life as being an embodiment of that slash, “and/or” and therefore an occasion for asking what seems to me a question the answer to which determines the success—I mean the lively and secure survival—of [...]
Think how peculiar this appellation is: “Pre-Socratics.” A whole slew of thinkers, poetical, aphoristic, prosaic—condemned to be known as the precursors of a man who wrote nothing! Forerunners are, it seems, ipso facto inferior to the rightly anointed. Take John the Baptist, the canonical precursor, who says of himself: “…he that cometh after me is [...]
Let me first explain my odd-sounding title. It is a variation on the most famous question-and-answer about time ever posed. It comes from the eleventh book of Augustine’s Confessions, published about 400 C.E.: This is his question: “What, then, is time?” And this is his preliminary answer: “If nobody asks me, I know; if I [...]
This note is written in memory of David Lachterman, who was an alumnus—using the term in its fullest significance—of St. John's College, Class of 1965, when I was a young tutor. He was in my classes only in his junior year: in a preceptorial entitled "The Fragments of Parmenides and Heraclitus," and in the mathematics [...]
A Suitable Boy: A Novel, by Vikram Seth (Harper Collins: 1993) What are book reviews for? Some are to vent righteous spleen—a scribbler has wasted our time, and here is the moment for revenge. Some are to establish superiority—what an author has made a critic can now break. Some are to whet the appetite—a writer has [...]
Soul, World, and Idea: An Interpretation of Plato’s Republic and Phaedo by Daniel Sherman. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013) “To save the phenomena” of heavenly motions by undergirding them with rational, that is, mathematical, hypotheses—that is said to be the problem Plato set for astronomers in a passage from the Republic frequently referenced by Daniel [...]
Welcome to St. John’s College. To our returning students, faculty and staff, welcome back. To our freshmen and their families, we are very happy to have you joining us. In the next few days, you freshmen will begin working your way through a book that I think, more than any other, serves as an exemplar [...]
The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987) Here is a book which compels the question whether we should be glad of its existence. My answer is that we should be thrice glad, glad once that it was written, and glad that, having been produced, it found such [...]
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PEL_ep_079_6-22-13.mp3 In the above podcast, Eva Brann discusses her book The Logos of Heraclitus (2011). What is the world like, and how can we understand it? Heraclitus thinks that the answer to both questions is found in "the logos," which is a Greek word with multiple meanings: it can be an explanation, a word [...]