Tag Archives: Plato

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Probably the most famous letter writer of the ancient world was Cicero. In 59 B.C., Cicero wrote to Gaius Scribonius: “There are many sorts of letters. But there is one unmistakable sort, which actually caused letter-writing to be invented in the first place, namely the sort intended to give people in other places any information which for our or their…

A recurring theme in Plato’s dialogues, including his Seventh Letter, describes the education of a young man who wants to achieve the highest things, which he considers to be achieved primarily through his ruling the polity. He wants to be a tyrant. This desire, he explains to others, means that he wants to “do good” and thereby receive high honors.…

Socrates and Divine Revelation. Lewis Fallis. Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2018.
 
In the landscape of political philosophy today, one is fairly hard-pressed to find any serious consideration of the significance of the divine. Dismissing it as absurd or at least unknowable, there is instead a turn to the exclusively “human things,” as though they could be separated from considerations of…

Socrates describes the “Ideal City” early in Bk. II of the Republic. Glaucon is not satisfied with the constitution. He says that “you make the people feast without delicacies” (372c).[1] Socrates adds some delicacies, but Glaucon challenges the Ideal City on the same grounds. It is too austere. He says, you have founded a “city for pigs” (372d). Socrates responds…

I thank Steven McGuire for organizing this symposium and Lee Trepanier for publishing it here on Voegelinview. Away from the friendships unfriendly that dominate the internet and social media, Voegelinview is an online forum for serious discussion open to anyone who wishes to participate. I am grateful to the contributors—Carol Cooper, Rudy Hernandez, James Greenaway, and Joshua Bowman— for taking…

In The Form of Politics, John von Heyking directs his readers to the critical importance of friendship in the political thought of Aristotle and Plato. The title nicely captures the key finding of the book: true friendship between individuals was thought by Aristotle and Plato to provide an analog for the harmony that might be achieved in a political community.…

John von Heyking’s analysis of friendship in The Form of Politics centers on the Greek concept of sunaisthesis, the triangle of perception and recognition that occurs when two friends, both interiorly oriented towards the good, are simultaneously “beholding the good while beholding one another beholding the good.”[1] Von Heyking argues that sunaisthesis, which is characteristic of Aristotelian “virtue-friendship,” is both…

The Italian philosopher and statesman, Benedetto Croce, once wrote that, “politics and filth are so frequently identified in the ordinary conversation of people that the thoughtful person is rather puzzled by the situation. Why should politics, one of the fundamental activities of man, one of the perpetual forms of the human spirit, alone enjoy homage of such contemptuous language? We…