In Plato’s cave, humans watch silhouettes flicker on the wall, unaware that fires just behind them are distorting reality into a shadow world – not unlike the world we find ourselves in today, aided ...

This all-day Saturday session begins by briefly considering philosophy in the emerging Greek world, from Thales to Socrates. What does Socrates offer that is new and how? Discussion, debate, dialogue, ...

Q. Why did ancient Greeks like Plato and Socrates have only one name? A. You can search the history books forever and never find a single allusion to little Billy Socrates or his precocious playground ...

Born in 427 BC, Plato fled Athens in 399 BC after Socrates was executed, blaming democracy and the Peloponnesian War for his teacher's death. An aristocrat and an elitist, much of what we know about ...

Socrates’s ‘mistake,’ from the perspective of the powerful elite in Athens, was that he – like Charlie Kirk long after him – ...

Plato takes on Bill O’Reilly! The great philosopher, dead for 2,400 years, argues with Amy Chua! And Daniel Dennett! And Google! This is philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s hook in her ...

Detail from the Chigi vase. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public domain While discussing philosophy in the public square, Socrates would also have been training as a hoplite, a heavily armed foot soldier ...

Socrates was remarkably full-blooded for an ascetic philosopher. In Xenophon’s Symposium, he says, “For myself I cannot name the time at which I have not been in love with someone.” By all accounts, ...