Asking All the Right Questions: How Plato moved from utopianism to practical politics
My chum and colleague reviews three books (full review here or here). ancient philosophyAndrew IrvinePlato
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Williams on Plato: The Invention of Philosophy
Excerpt from The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy (2007) Plato invented the subject of philosophy as we know it. He lived from 427 to 347 bc, and he is the first philosopher whose works have come down to us complete. He is also the first to have written on the full…
‘The Clarke Plato’
‘The Clarke Plato’: the oldest manuscript (discounting papyrus fragments) for about half the dialogues of Plato, perhaps once the first volume of a two-volume set. Commissioned by Arethas of Patrae (bishop of Caesarea, 902-c. 939), who paid 21 gold coins for the copying and the parchment, and added scholia in the margin in a tiny…
Sun, Line and the Cave
Plato’s simile of light – the images of the Sun, the Divided Line and the Cave are outlined in the Republic at the close of Book VI and at the beginning of Book VII. The simile of light has attracted a vast literature from Nettleship’s Victorian lectures, down through the work of James Adam, Henry Jackson and…
Socrates on Trial
I want to give a plug to my chum Andrew Irvine’s play Socrates on Trial. Of perennial interest it is a way of communicating important ideas in an accessible but compelling way. Here is a dedicated page with video footage and reviews. Andrew IrvineAristophanesAthensPlatoSocratesSpartaXenophon
Fiction and the brain
Here’s a recent article referring to Joshua Landy’s very interesting work. Check out his just released book How to Do Things with Fictions. This blurb alone is recommendation enough: Witty and approachable, How to Do Things with Fictions challenges the widespread assumption that literary texts must be informative or morally improving in order to be of any real…
Plato to Domino
It’s been exactly five years since this “blog” began. So I thought I’d mark the occasion with an unlikely pairing – Plato and “Fats” Domino, the latter arguably the earliest pioneer of what we have come to recognize as rock ‘n roll. Eldridge Cleaver or somebody said that, with rock, the blacks gave the middle…
What is a philosopher?
Simon Critchley in The New York Times. See Leiter’s critical take on Critchley.
The History of Social Epistemology
Here is the latest issue of EPISTEME.
manwithoutqualities 