Monday, November 13, 2006

Plato

Plato vs. Grand Theft Auto, by Roger Sandall, Ideas and Argument August 2009 (via Arts & Letters Daily)

It taught me that there are some important questions to ask, that just because there are questions doesn't mean there are answers, and that even if there are, the questions and the questioning might be more important anyway. --Martin A. Linsky, The Harvard guide to influential books: 113 distinguished Harvard professors discuss the books that have helped to shape their thinking (1986), edited by C. Maury Devine, Kim D. Parrish, and Claudia Dissell, p. 139, on The Republic


This reckless questioning is not the same as wisdom. But I can easily imagine a young Plato coming home from Italy and wanting to scream from the rooftops: “You lemmings! Must we all eat olives and figs?”

It is a powerful experience to see that things don’t have to be the way they are, that our societies and our lives can be arranged otherwise. This is one of the great gifts of seeing the world.

It can be like coming out of our cave, blinking and looking. --Frank Bures, Plato Was a Backpacker, World Hum


To all such ‘scholars ... would-be scholars ... mythomaniacs and charlatans’ Pierre Vidal-Naquet had one answer, the same answer for half a century: Plato made Atlantis up. --James Davidson, Plato Made It Up, by James Davidson, London Review of Books, June 19, 2008, review of The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato’s Myth, by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, translated by Janet Lloyd

presented me not only with a flurry of ideas and a way of investigating them and thinking them through but also with a figure, Socrates, vividly portrayed, who embodied these ideas and lived this inquiry. --Robert Nozick, The Harvard guide to influential books: 113 distinguished Harvard professors discuss the books that have helped to shape their thinking (1986), edited by C. Maury Devine, Kim D. Parrish, and Claudia Dissell, pp. 186-187, on The Republic

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform, and self-existent, forever discriminating them from the notions of the understanding, marks an era in the world. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, Plato; or, the Philosopher, Representative Men (1850), Chapter 2

Parmenides by Raymond Tallis, Prospect, January 2007
(via Arts & Letters Daily)

Hemlock Available in the Faculty Lounge by Thomas Cushman, Chronicle Review, March 16, 2007
(via Arts & Letters Daily)

The Forgotten Virtue: How Plato perceived the importance of courage, by Harvey Mansfield, review of Plato and the Virtue of Courage by Linda R. Rabieh, The Weekly Standard, January 29, 2007

The Seductions of Socrates, by David K. O’Connor, First Things, June/July 2001

The Politics of Transcendence: The Pretentious Passivity of Platonic Idealism, by Claes G. Ryn, Humanitas 1999 No. 2

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