Into the Cave
An excerpted passage from an excerpted essay by Simon Blackburn on the Republic:
"Anyone who stays very long in the vast silent mausoleums lined with works about Plato and his influence runs the risk of suffocating. Anyone writing on this topic must be conscious of an enormous and disapproving audience, dizzying ranks of ghosts overseeing and criticising omissions and simplifications. Many of these ghosts belong to the most brilliant linguists, scholars, philosophers, theologians and historians of their day. They do not take kindly to the garden to which they devoted their lives being trampled over by outsiders and infidels. And Republic is the shrine at the very centre of the sanctuary, since for centuries it has been the one compulsory subject in the philosophy syllabus, so these same scholars will have been educated with it as the centrepiece and inspiration."
A daunting task, but one that our own Scantron will handle ably and nobly. An early good luck to you.
"Anyone who stays very long in the vast silent mausoleums lined with works about Plato and his influence runs the risk of suffocating. Anyone writing on this topic must be conscious of an enormous and disapproving audience, dizzying ranks of ghosts overseeing and criticising omissions and simplifications. Many of these ghosts belong to the most brilliant linguists, scholars, philosophers, theologians and historians of their day. They do not take kindly to the garden to which they devoted their lives being trampled over by outsiders and infidels. And Republic is the shrine at the very centre of the sanctuary, since for centuries it has been the one compulsory subject in the philosophy syllabus, so these same scholars will have been educated with it as the centrepiece and inspiration."
A daunting task, but one that our own Scantron will handle ably and nobly. An early good luck to you.
posted by Robot at 1:00 AM
3 Comments:
give them hell!
after jean benet, we're all phentermine addicts now.
Don't worry, folks--they say that novelty is the key to academic success, so I know the topic of my dissertation already: I'll be showing how Plato was actually a dwarf slave from Scythia who made his money selling leather dildoes in the agora. Proof can be found at Rep 346c, 457a-c, Statesman 257a, Laws 640d-f, et al.
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