Strictly speaking, there can be no biography of Plato — only what Carol Atack calls a “biographical tradition.” Exactly when he was born, exactly where he traveled, and to what extent his famous ...

In my roughly 10 years of philosophical education — four in college, one in a master’s program and five as a PhD candidate — it never occurred to me that Plato was a person. Of course, I read and ...

One of my less than admirable traits is to attempt to categorize and organize everything into its simplest terms. All too often, simple devolves to simplistic as I keep trying to pound an unwilling ...

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” For a man who knew nothing, Plato certainly contributed a lot of knowledge to the world. Plato is hailed as one of ...

Katie has a PhD in maths, specializing in the intersection of dynamical systems and number theory. She reports on topics from maths and history to society and animals. Katie has a PhD in maths, ...

Sometimes, even the newest ideas have ancient roots. Take, for example, neoconservatism, the radical philosophy that supposedly guided the Bush administration’s ill-fated foreign policy decisions. Who ...

Diogenes of Sinope, a beggar who lived on the streets of Athens in the fourth century B.C.E., has been hailed as the progenitor of performance art, an inspiration for the Occupy movement, and, by the ...

It is possible to argue about who is the finest Renaissance painter. It is possible to argue in this way about sculptors, writers, poets, more or less any sort of artist. However, if the question is ...

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 ...