Chesterton to Plato

On authors in my recommended reading:

Chesterton, almost everyone recalls, described his circumnavigation in search of something which, when finally he came upon it, he discovered to be—orthodoxy. The Pope as Theological Swinger is not what one wants. --William F. Buckley

Tolstoy preached chastity and poverty, though he had a gift for neither, as his wife pointed out. --Jay Parini

It was clear to all the delegates [at the Constitutional convention] that a definitive resolution of the slavery question—most especially any insistence that slavery be gradually phased out—would have doomed passage and ratification of the Constitution. The distasteful but nonnegotiable reality was that one could have a nation with slavery, or one could not have a nation. --Joseph J. Ellis

The Socratic method is not as ominpresent as it once was in law schools, but it is still widely used, more or less, in most law schools, by most professors, at least some of the time.
     And that's a scandal. For there is no evidence--as in "none"--that the Socratic method is an effective teaching tool. And there is much evidence that it's a recipe for total confusion. --Brian Leiter