Tag Archives: Plato

To Strengthen Your Caring, Read Lit

When we become numb to the world’s horrors, the problem is not the numbness but the insufficient attention paid. Reading lit can help us overcome compassion fatigue

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Can Lit Also Be a Force for Evil? A Debate

The classics are capable to doing great good but can they also do harm? Even as they powerfully open up the mind to new possibilities, can they also close it down? A debate.

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Plato Anxious about Lit’s Pyschic Impact

Plato’s complaints about literature show up in censorship battles today. They testify to power of literature to invite imitation.

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Plato’s Warning: Beware of Poets

While Plato advocated banning poets from the ideal republic, his censure works as an indirect testimony to literature’s power.

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Finding Hope in a Captured Fish

Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” works as a powerful meditation on hope.

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Blow Out Your Candles, No Darkness

This Richard Wilbur poem has fun kidding the poet’s esoteric friend.

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Why Literary Suffering Made Plato Nervous

Plato worried that Greek tragedy causes us to act irrationally.

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Answer the Door, Child–Truth is Knocking

We had our major awards ceremony this past Saturday. As is tradition, we began with a poem by Lucille Clifton that she allowed us to adapt slightly for the occasion.Our president then gave one of his patented speeches, this one centered on Plato’s Meno. It was exactly what I wanted our students to hear: a full-blown defense of the liberal arts.

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Final Instructions from a Dying Teacher

Last Thursday we had our memorial service for my friend Alan Paskow, the philosophy colleague whom I have written about several times. In my own remarks I invoked Plato’s Crito. I said that, for the three-plus years that Alan lived with the diagnosis of a terminal illness, he was like Socrates after having drunk the hemlock He knew that he was dying but he used his illness as an opportunity to explore with others what it meant. Like Socrates, he was a teacher to the end.

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