Word: plato
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...goal of your elite education has not been, as Plato famously conceived it, to ascend above the unilluminated ignorance of the cave. Instead, afraid to cause offense by privileging one view over others, Harvard has aspired simply to make us feel more comfortable in our darkness...
...shortchanged. While he will have spent $3,000 on books for his classes, he will not have bought a single work of William Shakespeare or Henry James. He will be wholly unfamiliar with John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus might as well be Plato or Aristotle—that is to say, Greek. This newspaper reported last Thursday that Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay Harris informed an ad hoc committee deliberating the addition of a Great Books element to the new Program for General Education that the plan was on hold...
...Plato mistook the good...
Smyth is a gorgeous place to study--surrounded by classical literary criticism, small statues, and the portraits of old white men. Okay, the last are sort of intimidating. Graduate students whip out their dusted hardcovers with the Greek original--and only the Greek original--of Homer, Herodotus, and Plato. The Loeb editions--with Greek on one side and English on the other--are too childish for them. Don't plan on looking at Facebook photos in this library...
Walk up the ladder to the stacks tucked away in the back, and find a treasure-trove of the most fascinating old books. The air reeks of old paper. One can find anything in the Lowell stacks: a manual of economic history, a bound volume of Plato in ancient Greek, a polemic from a Latin professor at Princeton 100 years ago on why study of the classics in the original Latin and Greek should remain required for all college students. Those stairs—though rickety—are an unforgettable portal to the past...