Word: plato
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Things would be radically different. In terms of academics, courses on Plato, Aristotle and other "dead white males" would be replaced by studies of the ocuvre of Rigoberta Menchu. In residential life, we would have houses devoted to every possible ethnicity and sexual orientation. The dining halls would serve junk food instead of their nominally healthy offerings. (I admit that this last example may actually undermine my argument...
...perhaps he meant something less Luciferian: that nature, to the artist, is like carnal desire to the saint. It is a trap, a lower substitute for higher ecstasy, an occasion of sin. He knows it is beautiful, but he must still banish it from his art (as Plato urged the banishment of the poet from the ideal republic) because it provokes irrational thoughts and undisciplined emotions...
...Mondrian was the supreme Platonist of modernism. He believed that his grids, representing nothing but themselves and, as Plato said of his perfect solids, "free from the itch of desire," could demonstrate a universal order, an essence that underwrote the mere accidents of the world as it is. Reach that essence, and consciousness would be transfigured. This mystical idea had a long history, running from Plato through medieval Catholicism and thence to the pseudo religion of Theosophy, to which Mondrian adhered in his youth in Holland...
Great thinkers have had no shortage of ideas on the subject. Plato was convinced that the mind must be located inside the head, because the head is shaped more or less like a sphere, his idea of the highest geometrical form. Aristotle insisted that the mind was in the heart. His reasoning: warmth implies vitality; the blood is warm; the heart pumps the blood. By the Middle Ages, though, pretty much everyone agreed that the mind arose from the brain -- but still had no clear idea how it arose. Finally, in the 17th century, the French philosopher Rena Descartes declared...
Finley, who taught at Harvard for 43 years, joined the faculty in 1933. his most popular course, humanities 103, titled "The Great Age of Athens," focused on the works of Homer, Plato and Aristotle...