Word: plato
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...being raised, however, brought bellows of protest from academic conservatives like Education Secretary William Bennett. A devout classicist, he accused Stanford's revisionists of "academic intimidation," claiming that a "very vocal minority is attempting to overpower a less vocal majority." Dismantling the core curriculum, he warned, amounted to "trashing Plato and Shakespeare...
...describing the effect he hopes his lyrics will have on the band's audience, Magus discusses Plato's theory on the esoteric and the exoteric, saying that the hidden meaning of his songs will become apparent after repeated listenings. "I like my songs to be sort of like a window to look through; you can see anything however you want to," Magus has said...
STONE sets Plato's Socratic dialogues against the accounts of contemporary Greek dramatists to try to reconstruct the story of Socrates and Athens. Plato, Socrates' Boswell, so to speak, was often disingenuous in recounting his mentor's ordeal. Through Plato, Socrates became a noble martyr forced to drink the hemlock because of he constantly exhorted his fellow Athenians to virtue. But, Stone writes, Socrates wasn't tried simply for being a nudge. Socrates may be "revered as a nonconformist, but few realize that he was a rebel against an open society and the admirer of a closed...
Unfortunately, the price of applying Stone's journalistic skills to the great texts was a lack of philosophical insight. Treating the ancient texts like modern-day government documents, Stone doesn't seem to have been interested in grappling with the secondary literature written on Plato and Socrates during the past millenia or two. Most egregious of all is his failure to deal with the controversial interpretations made by the man most responsible for the renaissance of classical studies in recent years...
...both necessary and impossible. The Republic, by this account, is really a massive excercise in irony, a lesson less in how to construct a utopia than in the limits of what we can reasonably expect from politics. Stone, attributing this interpretation to one "Alan [sic] Bloom", writes that, "Plato could hardly have spent his life spoofing himself...