On Teaching

by Wilfred M. McClay
There are many things that the world doesn’t understand about teaching. One of them is this: teachers themselves rarely have the occasion to step back and reflect on the meaning of what it is they’re doing. What is teaching, after all? Why should anyone do it? What is the point of education in general? How should we go about it? Here Prof. McClay considers just these questions, drawing on the classical tradition and on years of his own teaching experience to reflect on the nature, aims, and means of educating.

Plato

Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

Today, Sir Henry is remembered as one of the nineteenth century's most important legal historians: his conception of contractual association as the distinguishing mark of Modernity remains an instructive lens through which to reflect on who we are and where we come from. But, at least in his undergraduate days at Pembroke College, Cambridge, he also proved himself to be both a poet and a Platonist of sorts; and one result was this tribute to the Master, which he submitted in 1843 in an (alas, unsuccessful) bid for the Chancellor's English Medal.

Clarion Vines: A Column for the Future Wines of History

Jonathan D. Price
Plato’s thoughts on love in the Symposium are shared over wine; Jesus offers eternal life together with the Source of All in the drink. In this new column, Executive Editor Jonathan D. Price will review wines for the prospective drinker: What should I pay? How long should I wait? Is there any accounting for taste? As he does so, he will also encourage the reader to develop a phronema for the proper enjoyment of wine: not as a mere sensory thrill, but as a gateway to contemplation of the sublime.

Bad Math and Poor Eyesight: Reconfiguring Dante’s Hellscape

Arnaud Zimmern
Dante's imagery in the Inferno is haunting. But, for all the care he took in crafting his canti, recent scholarship has revealed errors of scale and proportion in his descriptions of the infernal environs. Was he just a lousy arithmetician? Was he deliberately undermining his narrative with a bit of ironic miscalculation? Or are Dante's apparent mistakes in fact occasions for him to explore a fundamental question about man's redemption?

Our Hero Socrates

Peter Augustine Lawler
It’s my pleasure to be able to introduce Nalin Ranasinghe’s Socrates and the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgias to you as one of the most able, eloquent, noble, profound, and loving books ever written on Socrates. Ranasinghe restores for us the example of a moral hero who inaugurated a moral revolution in opposition to his country’s post-imperial cynicism and nihilism. What Socrates discovered about the human soul remains true for us in our similarly cynical and nihilistic time. Here’s the truth: