A. 1. Socrates is about to go on with the investigation of the unjust cities when he is again restrained, as once before on his way up to Athens (327), by a conspiracy of Polemarchus and Adeimantus (499). After some whispering, a vote is taken and the decree that has been passed is announced by Thrasymachus [...]
My first and last care is not politics (a late-learned duty) but education (an abiding passion). Education seems to me inherently conservative, being the transmission, and thus the saving, of a tradition’s treasures of fiction and thought…. But education is also inherently imaginative, because from pre-school to graduate school, it consists, or should consist, primarily [...]
A. 1-2. We come now to the arguments, the logoi, that form the broad middle ring encircling the center. Just as the question concerning the connection of justice to happiness is answered by bringing to light the human soul in its mythical shape, so the soul itself, that is, its formal “constitution,” is discovered by [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
As a graduate of St. John’s College, Annapolis (Master of Arts, 2013), I am proud be associated with a college that is home to such a national treasure as Eva Brann. Whimsical yet sometimes dense, Ms. Brann’s writing is always a pleasure to read, even when it requires the reader to put in hard work—and [...]
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 [...]