Sublime

There is to be “one royal lie,” which, Plato hopes, may deceive the rulers, but will at any rate deceive the rest of the city. This “lie” is set forth in considerable detail. The most important part of it is the dogma that God has created men of three kinds, the best made of gold, the second best of silver, and the common herd of brass and iron. Th

John Reuchlin said of Pythagoras that he taught nothing to his disciples before the discipline of silence, silence being the first rudiment of contemplation.

Platon entreprend de nous montrer que l'honneur de ce soldat de la vertu engageait aussi la philosophie elle-même. Pour Socrate, en effet, la vertu n'est rien sans la poursuite du savoir et le désir insatiable de connaître, ce que désigne précisément le terme grec philosophía3. Il n'y a pas de courage, pas de tempérance ni de justice sans amour du

Plato’s The Republic. I’m actually gobsmacked that this isn’t required in order to be sworn into office,

First of all, girls are to have exactly the same education as boys, learning music, gymnastics, and the art of war along with the boys. Women are to have complete equality with men in all respects. “The same education which makes a man a good guardian will make a woman a good guardian; for their original nature is the same.” No doubt there are diff

According to the classicist Anthony A. Long, Epictetus expected his pupils to satisfy two conditions: “(1) wanting to benefit from philosophy and (2) understanding what a commitment to philosophy entails.”20 Epictetus knew that his words would be wasted on students who didn’t yet recognize their own inadequacies or who weren’t willing to take the s

So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.” (Five Dialogues,

What most men have taken from Plato is belief in a supersensible intellectual world and in the superiority of the immortal soul to the mortal body. But Plato was many-sided, and in some respects could be regarded as teaching scepticism. The Platonic Socrates professes to know nothing; we naturally treat this as irony, but it could be taken seriousl