Word: plato
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...Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Dante, Copernicus, Shakespeare, Descartes, Newton, Rousseau, Kant, Darwin, Dickens, Tolstoy and Nietzsche...
Actually, it's the central theme of mankind. Indeed, ever since Plato divided the soul into reason, passion and appetite, people have struggled to explain how to become disciples of themselves; they have groped to understand how to use reason--the most venerable of our faculties--to tame our less auspicious features. This relationship is, of course, the answer to the singular question which a humane education should answer: How should I live...
...answer to the question is the life in accordance with reason, how does one attain such a life? Well it can be certain that one doesn't just wake up one day and decide to live according to reason. No, in order to live this life, one must, as Plato's sharpest student Aristotle said (more or less), practice, practice, practice. But as Bennett so wryly notes, this "is the medicine so many people find hard to swallow...
...books of the Hebrew Bible, sometimes in combination with a nationalistically tinged Messianism or the re-establishment of a paradise located in a new Jerusalem. In Greece the privileged dead gradually came to inhabit the Isles of the Blessed, later the Elysian fields, and in the 4th century B.C. Plato championed the concept of judgment after death in his Gorgias, and, in Phaedrus, postulated an immortal soul that strove ever upward after gaining its freedom from the flesh. What made Jesus' synthesis of these traditions new was the teaching that heavenly happiness consisted not of material pleasures, tribal triumph...
...back as Plato's Republic, democracy is described as a singularly bright concoction, nicknamed the many-colored regime. Many pundits this way and that have noticed that successful democracies often look like marketplaces with loud conversations and lively bargaining. Marketplaces and democracies are not identical, but they do look alike...