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“Stay true. Be you.” “Stay true to yourself.” “Be who you are.” “Just be yourself.” “You do you.” These slogans are part of the fundamental fabric of our society. They are echoed in popular music and books. So many movies, especially children’s movies, portray heroes and heroines who dream of throwing off the shackles of societal norms and a monotonous,…

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…

Famously, Socrates caps off his preliminary account of the beautiful city in the Republic with a description of the primary condition – by his own admission a very controversial condition – by which a truly beautiful and just city could come to be, namely the rulers who can bring it about:
"Unless philosophers rule as kings in their cities . .…

A Case for Irony. Jonathan Lear (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
 
Today we often misunderstand irony for sarcasm, self-detachment, or cleverness instead as a source of potential knowledge that can disrupt the mundane routine of our lives. Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee of Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy at the University…

I will be focusing on the following questions: What is the place of these texts in the corpus of Patocka’s works? How do they fit into the overall context of his philosophical investigations, inspired essentially by Husserl’s phenomenology? What is the message of his Socratic teaching for us today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century?
Before I continue, I wish…

The Sophists in Plato's Dialogues. David D. Corey. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2015. Paperback, $85.00.
 
David D. Corey's The Sophists in Plato's Dialogues examines the sophists portrayed in Plato's dialogues to illuminate their relationship to Socrates and thereby demonstrate what is distinctive about Platonic philosophy. The book consists of eight chapters (an introduction and seven chapters), an appendix that analyzes Hesiod's…

Socrates Meets Kierkegaard: The Father of Philosophy Meets the Father of Christian Existentialism. Peter Kreeft. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2014.
 
In his essay on Hegel, Eric Voegelin wrote that “the practice of philosophy in the Socratic-Platonic sense is the equivalent of the Christian sanctification of man; it is the growth of the image of God in man”. It is with…

"War and battle" are the opening words of Plato's Gorgias, and the declaration of war against the corrupt society is its content. Gorgias, the famous teacher of rhetoric, is in Athens as the guest of Callicles, an enlightened politician. It is a day of audience. Gorgias receives vis­itors and is ready to answer all questions addressed to him. Socrates, with…