Word: plato
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Perhaps only true sci-fi fans can pick up a book and note, without yelping in protest, that it takes place in roughly A.D. 3705. Yet Peter Ackroyd's The Plato Papers (Doubleday; 173 pages; $19.95) offers just such a leap forward in time with almost no accompanying science or fiction, at least in the sense of narrative exposition and descriptions of characters and settings. So what is Ackroyd, a prolific British biographer and novelist (The Life of Thomas More, English Music...
...also, by nature and intention, unfair and incomplete, and frequently irrational. Macaulay said of Socrates, "The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him"--which might have made sense if Socrates (whom we know only from Plato) had left anything to read. Charles Kingsley called Shelley "a lewd vegetarian"--an intriguing idea but difficult to picture...
...began to realize that people are strongly biologically conditioned to respond more favorably to the pretty. But surely, I thought to myself, as rational creatures we can recognize when our biological inclinations are unjust and keep them in check. So I was extremely surprised when I discovered that Plato, the most celebrated philosopher in the Western tradition and a champion of virtue and reason, believed that an appreciation for physical beauty was the first step in the ascent towards the contemplation of the abstract "form of the good...
When Dante Alighieri compiled his great medieval Who's Who of heroes and villains, the Divine Comedy, the highest a non-Christian could climb was Limbo. Ancient pagans had to be virtuous indeed to warrant inclusion: the residents included Homer, Caesar, Plato and Dante's guide, Vergil. But perhaps the most surprising entry in Dante's catalog of "great-hearted souls" was a figure "solitary, set apart...
...Harvard, these crusty Eurocentrists finger Foreign Cultures and its thriving colonies in Historical Studies and Literature and Arts. Harvard students need not read Plato, Shakespeare or Locke to graduate--in fact, chances are they won't. As the Goths conquered Rome, they say, so multiculturalism has sacked Harvard's liberal arts requirements...