Plato Archives - Public Seminar

Philosophy

Martha Stewart’s Tripartite Soul

The ambitious Martha Stewart would never want to go to prison. The spirited Martha Stewart is willing to negotiate.

April 14, 2025 • by Anabelle Helsell

Anabelle Helsell on how the collapse of the personal and public in Martha Stewart's career echoes the warnings of Plato’s Republic....

Middle East & North Africa

And why friendship and enlightenment flourish together

April 19, 2024 • by Omri Boehm

In his acceptance speech for the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, Omri Boehm discusses the challenge of open discussion....

Music

Taylor Swift, the Modern Alcibiades

We think we know who the pop star is. But does Plato know better?

February 27, 2024 • by Jack Condie

Much ink has been spilled on whether she’s a feminist hero or ruthless capitalist villain. I think she’s a modern day Alcibiades. ...

Kinships

Living with wrongdoing

February 21, 2024 • by Helga Varden

Hope for the future is only possible if we choose peace by stopping the killing and resist the temptation of avenging heroism....

Economy

Why We Should Worry about Inequality

And why we should take seriously Plato and John Stuart Mill

January 11, 2023 • by David Lay Williams

Plato and Mill respectively propose a variety of measures to achieve their desired degree of economic equality (not precise equality in either case), though both agree (1) that inheritance taxes should play a significant role, and (2) that this equality should be achieved incrementally, rather than all at once, to ...

Higher Ed

“God Is Dead”

And other memories of coming of age gay and Catholic in the sixties

October 12, 2022 • by John D’Emilio

I was flabbergasted. The idea that someone not only didn’t believe in God but also had grown up without God was something I couldn’t take in. All I could think was, “Wow. Without God, he’d never have to worry about whether he was going to hell, whether he’d make it ...

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

What makes the arts an essential part of a society is their freestanding value—a value that cannot be described as radical, liberal, or conservative

February 28, 2022 • by Jed Perl

While there have been many periods when the arts inspired some sort of controversy, different times have different troubles. In our data- and metrics-obsessed era, the central problem is that the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is under threat....

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

Social Research

Take Me Out with the Crowd

On loneliness and Hannah Arendt

February 16, 2022 • by Christian Sheppard

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism tells the true crime story of the twentieth century. Contrary to the basic requirements of human condition, Loneliness is one of the fundamental experiences of human life. ...

Social Research

Loneliness, The New Issue of Social Research

The New School journal introduces its latest issue

February 7, 2022 • by Social Research

time of social distancing: a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the latest issue of Social Research engages itself with a reconsideration of the ideas about loneliness in American Culture. The literature explores the concept of loneliness, as is present in a number of notable books: David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd; ...

Loneliness, The New Issue of <em>Social Research</em>

Science & Technology

Back to Belief

To believe in science – or that the aim of science is to deceive us – is to confuse opinion with belief

June 7, 2021 • by Michaël Fœssel

_____ When COVID-19 invited itself into our lives, it did not arrive alone. In its wake came a global flood of knowledge on respiratory viruses and their prevention and treatment. It has been pointed out that, in recent history, far more serious epidemics have swept through society, particularly the Spanish flu ...

Philosophy

What Did Aristotle Think About Slavery?

Why we need to read great books closely

August 27, 2020 • by Steven B. Smith

I admire Professor Collard’s attempt to defend Aristotle despite his views on slavery. My question is whether he actually held the views she attributes to him. We must avoid two common responses that seem to me misguided. The first is to reject Aristotle out of hand because his views do not ...

Politics

Expendable Bodies

What Sophocles can teach us about our political moment

June 25, 2020 • by Daniel Schillinger

An ancient Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s Philoctetes, can help us to think holistically about our own political moment. What Sophocles shows us is that the same bodies the polity dominates, annihilates, or consigns to suffering in isolation it also tends to use for its own ends. That political communities too often view ...