“Now is the time that gods came walking out/ of lived-in Things…/ Time that they came and knocked down every wall/ inside my house. [Jetzt wär es Zeit, daß Gӧtter trätten aus/ bewohnten Dingen…/ Und daß sie jede Wand in meinem Haus umschlügen.]” –Rilke, Fragment. When we think of the future of technology, we no …
This essay concludes our discussion of the Republic by elucidating Plato’s closing arguments for the contention that justice is an intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, good. After setting forth a taxonomy of constitutions and the types of individuals that correspond to them, Plato is now in a position to return to the central question of the …
This essay examines books VIII-IX of the Republic and sets forth Plato’s account of the characterological decay of the individual soul. Just as city’s degenerate with time, falling from philosophical aristocracy to timocracy, timocracy to oligarchy, oligarchy to democracy, and democracy to tyranny, so too do the individuals who live within them. Indeed, Socrates notes …