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Michial Farmer, Todd Pedlar, and David Grubbs talk about book four of Plato’s Republic.
Show Notes
- Our translations of the Republic: Benjamin Jowett (1888); John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan (1920); and C.D.C Reeve (2004).
- Plato’s republic is partially enacted in Huxley’s Brave New World and in More’s Utopia.
- Kierkegaard, at least, thought that Plato was an ironist.
- Plato would have banned Dave Brubeck from the Republic.
- T.S. Eliot on the danger of art:
But I incline to come to the alarming conclusion that it is just the literature that we read for ‘amusement’, or ‘purely for pleasure’ that may have the greatest and least suspected influence upon us. Hence it is that the influence of popular novelists, and of popular plays of contemporary life, requires to be scrutinized most closely. And it is chiefly contemporary literature that the majority of people ever read in this attitude of ‘purely for pleasure’, of pure passivity.
- Plato wants you to clean your room, Bucko.
- “Sympathy for the Devil” is more Platonic than it might seem.
- Our theme music was provided by Blue Dot Sessions.
Relevant Network Shows
- Christian Humanist Podcast 25: Plato.
- Christian Humanist Podcast 66: Desert-Island Books.
- Christian Humanist Podcast 95: Platonic Aesthetics.
- City of Man 7: Justice and the Bible.
- City of Man 75: Social Justice and the Gospel.