The very excellent Eugene Heath in Metaphilosophy. Philosophy should not be immured within the confines of the university but should step confidently into the communal spaces of society. Philosophy should include, in other words, public philosophy. What, however, is public philosophy? And is it an unalloyed good? These questions are the subject of this essay.…
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…
Lovely essay by Andrew Corsa (H/T to Eric Schliesser) Adam SmithAndrew CorsaAristotleDavid HumemagnanimitySocratessympathy and benevolence
Bernard Williams in the LRB reprinted in Essays and Reviews: 1959-2002. An update, see: The London Review of Books. As long as there has been such a subject as philosophy, there have been people who hated and despised it. I do not want to exaggerate, in a self-pitying or self-dramatising way, the present extent or intensity of this dislike; I…
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…
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
manwithoutqualities 