Philosophy can come from a cool, sober sense that the ways of the world should be exposed and explained, its myths dismantled and its depths made plane; that not what is best but what is individual, not what is common but what is ordinary, should preoccupy our efforts. My subject, as proposed, is “Plato’s Theory [...]
Tonight I want to state, and even to overstate, what I believe to be a truth about the Program of St. John’s College. What makes the truth worth considering is that it goes against the plain appearances and against what people, quite understandably, say about us. I want to state this truth especially for the [...]
I am very much alive to the fact that this is Homecoming weekend—homecoming not only for the alumni but also for me. I’ve been gone from St. John’s far and long—as far as Delaware and as long as a year. So I look on the place where I’ve spent exactly half my life as an [...]
So the reader of Plato joins Socrates in inquiry, as Sancho Panza joined Don Quixote, for adventures of the mind. And although there is a deep consent, like a fire kindled deep in the mind, there is always a tension between the squire and the knight-errant, the little man with proverbs for wisdom riding on [...]
I am going to lecture on a work largely autobiographical, whose hero is a charlatan and whose author is therefore the same. This is not my own but the author’s opinion of himself. My lecture will therefore be an inquiry into the nature of the essential charlatan—an enterprise in the spirit and tradition of Plato’s Ion. [...]
Plato’s dialogue Gorgias ends with a long speech culminating in a rousing cry by an aroused Socrates. He is speaking to Gorgias’s student Callicles about his swaggering opinionatedness and their common uneducatedness. The words he uses are neanieusthai, ‟to act like a youth,” to behave like a kid, and apaideusia, ‟lack of teaching,” ignorance. And [...]
“The things of friends are common.” —Greek proverb (quoted by Socrates in the Phaedrus) It is a pleasure to be with you today, to visit Belmont University and see Nashville for the very first time. My talk takes its cue from your theme for the year—“Living in a Global Community.” I have chosen to speak about [...]
We should learn to cultivate the unwillingness to tolerate the unwitting, untold lie in the soul, and the wit and wisdom to transmute the unavoidable lying of any utterance into the telling lies that reveal truth. The first lecture of the school year is, by an old tradition, dedicated to the freshmen among us. Whether you [...]
Peter Kalkavage, The Logic of Desire: An Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Paul Dry books Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is an enthralling “picture gallery” (447)* of the successive incarnations in which human consciousness appears in the world; it is also a repellant trudge through the abstract dialectic by which its concept develops. I would claim [...]
1. On Seeing Homer Epic is that kind of poetry—as distinguished from lyric and epic poetry, the poetry of the lyre and of action—which is particularly named after the word, for epos means the word as uttered in speech or song. Hence in reading the Homeric epics we certainly should, in addition to attending to the [...]
Section I The Legacy of the Declaration When American schoolchildren first discover that they have a place in the world they sometimes give their addresses a wonderful form. Transformed for our case, it would be: “Proper Name, St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland, the United States of America, the North American continent, the Earth, the Solar System.” [...]
I swore never to read again after ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ gave me no useful advice on killing mockingbirds. — Homer J. Simpson I’ve sometimes been surprised by how few ordinary Americans read important books—even texts that underpin widely held beliefs about our economy and society. Then at a cocktail party last year, I got into [...]
Before reviewing Peter Kalkavage’s Focus Press translation of the Timaeus, I must, in all fairness, confess my partiality. He, Eric Salem, and myself were the co-translators of Plato’s Phaedo and his Sophist for the same publisher. Together, over several years, we worked out some principles of translation which are discernible in this Timaeus version. In [...]
Recently there has been a lot of buzz[1] about a young CEO in Seattle who gave raises to all of his employees. Huge raises. In fact, taking a huge cut against his own nearly million-dollar salary, Dan Price of Gravity Payments[2] announced to his staff in April that he would be raising all of their [...]