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-for Carlo Ginzburg

1.
In his comparison of poetry to history, Aristotle points out that their difference is not one between verse and prose. After all, the writings of Herodotus would be a species of history with meter no less than without it. The real difference that distinguishes them is between telling what might be and what has been. ( Read more... )

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All of Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates is now available online.


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The news from home in the papers is the worst part of the day. I don’t know how to endure what is being done in Ireland - it is too utterly bestial and vile. And I see that there is a much more severe repression of communists in England than there used to be. In this part of the world the people who appear most wicked are the Japs and the people ( Read more... )

The last and the toughest among Socrates’ adversaries in Plato’s Gorgias, Callicles invokes law the sovereign of all, mortals and immortals, “νόμος ὁ πάντων βασιλεὺς θνατῶν τε καὶ ἀθανάτων”, at 484b-485d. He does so in support of his idea of natural justice, νόμος τῆς φύσεως. Callicles aims to distinguish what is conventionally fouler from what is ( Read more... )

    Can we regard Socrates and Alcibiades as erastes and eromenos?
    Starting in his adolescence, Alcibiades was a student, and a follower, of Socrates. Both of them used erotic language in speaking to, and of, each other. Is it reasonable to identify their relationship as paederastic? ( Read more... )

    Few doctrines are announced and articulated as clearly in Plato’s writings, as the thesis that the cosmos hands down certain moral commandments, that it is imbued with an absolute moral authority. Thus Socrates rebuts amoral hedonism advocated by Callicles:And wise men tell us, Callicles, that heaven and earth and gods and men are held together ( Read more... )

    Did Socrates posit a conflict between truth and life?
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― for T.H. Chance

There is but one truly serious moral problem, and it is that of apology. To make an apology, man must both acknowledge an external standard and defer to it. This much is easily attained. The hard part comes in requiring that his deference be both sincere and spontaneous. ( Read more... )