In any Greek city, there are perhaps no more than fifty good draught-players, and certainly not as many kings. –Plato, Statesman In one of Plato’s books, the philosopher Protagoras tells a genesis ...

Now, back to Plato. Plato’s radical solution to the danger of a democracy giving birth to a Trump-like tyrant is to eliminate democracy. That’s right. Plato was no friend of democracy. In his greatest ...

Prologue I learned a few things about Plato in high school and in my university classes on ancient and medieval Greek history. I improved that meager ...

How would you define democracy? The word democracy comes from the Greek words “demos,” meaning people, and “katos,” meaning power. So democracy can be thought of as the “power of the people,” a way of ...

I first read Plato as an undergraduate. Later, I studied his work in depth during my Ph.D. coursework. Plato viewed democracy as a form of tyranny. He argued that democracy gives power to people who ...

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 ...

Socrates’ method was to clear his students’ minds of abstractions and assumptions, so that they might attain self-knowledge and learn the practical wisdom of living well. His pupil Plato, however, ...

In her review of “Plato Goes to China” by Shadi Bartsch (Bookshelf, Feb. 27), Martha Bayles rightly defends Leo Strauss against the charge that the professor was an antidemocrat who would have favored ...

High-profile experts are staging two separate Washington press conferences Tuesday to demand action on public-debt problems. One group is targeting state budget crises; the other, the federal budget ...