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The Stranger And The Statesman
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Book Synopsis The Stranger and the Statesman by : Nina Burleigh
Download or read book The Stranger and the Statesman written by Nina Burleigh and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2003 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "After Smithson's death, nineteenth-century American politicans were given the task of securing his half-million dollars - the equivalent today of fifty million - and then trying to determine how to increase and diffuse knowledge from the muddy, brawling new city of Washington. Burleigh discloses how Smithson's bequest was nearly lost due to fierce battles among many clashing Americans - Southern slavers, state's rights advocates, nation-builders, corrupt frontiersmen, and Anglophobes who argued over whether a gift from an Englishman should even be accepted. She also reveals the efforts of the unsung heroes, mainly former president John Quincy Adams, whose tireless efforts finally saw Smithson's curious notion realized in 1846, with a castle housing the United States' first and greatest cultural and scientific establishment."--BOOK JACKET.
Book Synopsis A Stranger's Knowledge by : Xavier Márquez
Download or read book A Stranger's Knowledge written by Xavier Márquez and published by Parmenides Pub. This book was released on 2012 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Statesman is a difficult and puzzling Platonic dialogue. In A Stranger's Knowledge Marquez argues that Plato abandons here the classic idea, prominent in the Republic, that the philosopher, qua philosopher, is qualified to rule. Instead, the dialogue presents the statesman as different from the philosopher, the possessor of a specialist expertise that cannot be reduced to philosophy. The expertise is of how to make a city resilient against internal and external conflict in light of the imperfect sociality of human beings and the poverty of their reason. This expertise, however, cannot be produced on demand: one cannot train statesmen like one might train carpenters. Worse, it cannot be made acceptable to the citizens, or operate in ways that are not deeply destructive to the city's stability. Even as the political community requires his knowledge for its preservation, the genuine statesman must remain a stranger to the city. Marquez shows how this impasse is the key to understanding the ambiguous reevaluation of the rule of law that is the most striking feature of the political philosophy of the Statesman. The law appears here as a mere approximation of the expertise of the inevitably absent statesman, dim images and static snapshots of the clear and dynamic expertise required to steer the ship of state across the storms of the political world. Yet such laws, even when they are not created by genuine statesmen, can often provide the city with a limited form of cognitive capital that enables it to preserve itself in the long run, so long as citizens, and especially leaders, retain a “philosophical” attitude towards them. It is only when rulers know that they do not know better than the laws what is just or good (and yet want to know what is just and good) that the city can be preserved. The dialogue is thus, in a sense, the vindication of the philosopher-king in the absence of genuine political knowledge.
Book Synopsis The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum by : Nina Burleigh
Download or read book The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum written by Nina Burleigh and published by New Word City. This book was released on 2015-03-13 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her illuminating and dramatic biography The Stranger and the Statesman, New York Times bestselling author Nina Burleigh reveals a little-known slice of history in the life and times of the man responsible for the creation of the United States' principal cultural institution, the Smithsonian. It was one of the nineteenth century's greatest philanthropic gifts - and one of its most puzzling mysteries. In 1829, a wealthy English naturalist named James Smithson left his library, mineral collection, and entire fortune to the "United States of America, to found... an establishment for the increase & diffusion of Knowledge among men" - even though he had never visited the United States or known any Americans. In this fascinating book, Burleigh pieces together the reclusive benefactor's life, beginning with his origins as the Paris-born illegitimate son of the first Duke of Northumberland and a wild adventuress who preserved for her son a fortune through gall and determination. The book follows Smithson through his university years and his passionate study of minerals across Europe during the chaos of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Detailed are his imprisonment - simply for being an Englishman in the wrong place - his experiences in the gambling dens of France, and his lonely and painstaking scientific pursuits. After Smithson's death, nineteenth-century American politicians were given the task of securing his half-million dollars - the equivalent today of $50 million - and then trying to determine how to increase and diffuse knowledge from the muddy, brawling new city of Washington. Burleigh discloses how Smithson's bequest was nearly lost due to fierce battles among many clashing Americans - Southern slavers, states' rights advocates, nation-builders, corrupt frontiersmen, and Anglophobes who argued over whether a gift from an Englishman should even be accepted. She also reveals the efforts of the unsung heroes, mainly former president John Quincy Adams, whose tireless efforts finally saw Smithson's curious notion realized in 1846, with a castle housing the United States' first and greatest cultural and scientific establishment.
Book Synopsis Does God Hate Women? by : Ophelia Benson
Download or read book Does God Hate Women? written by Ophelia Benson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2009-07-21 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the role that religion and culture play in the oppression of women. Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom ask probing questions about the way that religion shields the oppression of women from criticism and why many Western liberals, leftists and feminists have remained largely silent on the subject. Does God Hate Women? explores instances of the oppression of women in the name of religious and cultural norms and how these issues play out both in the community and in the political arena. Drawing on philosophical concerns such as truth, relativism, knowledge and ethics, Benson and Stangroom assess the current situation and provide a rallying call for a progressive politics that is committed to universal values. This book will appeal to anyone interested in issues of global justice, human rights and multiculturalism.
Book Synopsis The Way of the Strangers by : Graeme Wood (Journalist)
Download or read book The Way of the Strangers written by Graeme Wood (Journalist) and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Way of the Strangers is an intimate journey into the minds of the Islamic State's true believers. From the streets of Cairo to the mosques of London, Wood interviews supporters, recruiters, and sympathizers of the group...Wood speaks with non-Islamic State Muslim scholars and jihadists, and explores the group's idiosyncratic, coherent approach to Islam...Through character study and analysis, Wood provides a clear-eyed look at a movement that has inspired so many people to abandon or uproot their families.
Book Synopsis Stranger's Knowledge by : Xavier Marquez
Download or read book Stranger's Knowledge written by Xavier Marquez and published by Parmenides Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-07 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Statesman is a difficult and puzzling Platonic dialogue. In A Stranger's Knowledge Marquez argues that Plato abandons here the classic idea, prominent in the Republic, that the philosopher, qua philosopher, is qualified to rule. Instead, the dialogue presents the statesman as different from the philosopher, the possessor of a specialist expertise that cannot be reduced to philosophy. The expertise is of how to make a city resilient against internal and external conflict in light of the imperfect sociality of human beings and the poverty of their reason. This expertise, however, cannot be produced on demand: one cannot train statesmen like one might train carpenters. Worse, it cannot be made acceptable to the citizens, or operate in ways that are not deeply destructive to the city's stability. Even as the political community requires his knowledge for its preservation, the genuine statesman must remain a stranger to the city.Marquez shows how this impasse is the key to understanding the ambiguous reevaluation of the rule of law that is the most striking feature of the political philosophy of the Statesman. The law appears here as a mere approximation of the expertise of the inevitably absent statesman, dim images and static snapshots of the clear and dynamic expertise required to steer the ship of state across the storms of the political world. Yet such laws, even when they are not created by genuine statesmen, can often provide the city with a limited form of cognitive capital that enables it to preserve itself in the long run, so long as citizens, and especially leaders, retain a "e;philosophical"e; attitude towards them. It is only when rulers know that they do not know better than the laws what is just or good (and yet want to know what is just and good) that the city can be preserved. The dialogue is thus, in a sense, the vindication of the philosopher-king in the absence of genuine political knowledge.
Book Synopsis Myth, Metaphysics and Dialectic in Plato's Statesman by : David A. White
Download or read book Myth, Metaphysics and Dialectic in Plato's Statesman written by David A. White and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's dialogue The Statesman has often been found structurally puzzling by commentators because of its apparent diffuseness and disjointed transitions. In this book David White interprets the dialogue in ways which account for this problematic structure, and which also connect the primary themes of the dialogue with two subsequent dialogues The Philebus and The Laws. The central interpretive focus of the book is the extended myth, sometimes called the 'myth of the reversed cosmos'. As a result of this interpretative approach, White argues that The Statesman can be recognized (a) as both internally coherent and also profound in implication-the myth is crucial in both regards - and (b) as integrally related to the concerns of Plato's later dialogues.
Download or read book The New Statesman written by and published by . This book was released on 1925 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Philosopher in Plato’s Statesman by : Mitchell H. Miller
Download or read book The Philosopher in Plato’s Statesman written by Mitchell H. Miller and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: others in his discipline tend not to bring their studies to bear on the substance of the dialogues. Conversely, philosophical interpreters have generally felt free to approach the extensive logical and ontological, cosmological, and political doctrines of the later dialogues without concern for questions of literary style s and form. Given, moreover, the equally sharp distinction between the diSCiplines of philosophy and cultural history, it has been too easy to treat this bulk of doctrine without a pointed sense of the specific historical audience to which it is addressed. As a result, the pervasive tendency has been the reverse of that which has dominated the reading of the early dialogues: here we tend to neglect drama and pedagogy and to focus exclusively on philosophical substance. Both in general and particularly in regard to the later dialogues, the difficulty is that our predispositions have the force of self-fulfilling prophecy. Are we sure that the later Plato's apparent loss of interest in the dramatic is not, on the contrary, a reflection of our limited sense of the integrity of drama and sub stance, form and content? What we lack eyes for, of course, we will not see. The basic purpose of this essay is to develop eyes, as it were, for that integrity. The best way to do this, I think, is to take a later dialogue and to try to read it as a whole of form, content, and communicative function.
Book Synopsis Plato and the Invention of Life by : Michael Naas
Download or read book Plato and the Invention of Life written by Michael Naas and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of life, Michael Naas argues, though rarely foregrounded by Plato, runs through and structures his thought. By characterizing being in terms of life, Plato in many of his later dialogues, including the Statesman, begins to discover—or, better, to invent—a notion of true or real life that would be opposed to all merely biological or animal life, a form of life that would be more valuable than everything we call life and every life that can actually be lived. This emphasis on life in the Platonic dialogues illuminates the structural relationship between many of Plato’s most time-honored distinctions, such as being and becoming, soul and body. At the same time, it helps to explain the enormous power and authority that Plato’s thought has exercised, for good or ill, over our entire philosophical and religious tradition. Lucid yet sophisticated, Naas’s account offers a fundamental rereading of what the concept of life entails, one that inflects a range of contemporary conversations, from biopolitics, to the new materialisms, to the place of the human within the living world.
Book Synopsis Plato, Aristotle, and the Purpose of Politics by : Kevin M. Cherry
Download or read book Plato, Aristotle, and the Purpose of Politics written by Kevin M. Cherry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Kevin M. Cherry compares the views of Plato and Aristotle about the practice, study and, above all, the purpose of politics. The first scholar to place Aristotle's Politics in sustained dialogue with Plato's Statesman, Cherry argues that Aristotle rejects the view of politics advanced by Plato's Eleatic Stranger, contrasting them on topics such as the proper categorization of regimes, the usefulness and limitations of the rule of law, and the proper understanding of phronēsis. The various differences between their respective political philosophies, however, reflect a more fundamental difference in how they view the relationship of human beings to the natural world around them. Reading the Politics in light of the Statesman sheds new light on Aristotle's political theory and provides a better understanding of Aristotle's criticism of Socrates. Most importantly, it highlights an enduring and important question: should politics have as its primary purpose the preservation of life, or should it pursue the higher good of living well?
Book Synopsis Plato's Political Philosophy by : Mark Blitz
Download or read book Plato's Political Philosophy written by Mark Blitz and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive, yet compact, introduction examines Plato's understanding of law, justice, virtue, and the connection between politics and philosophy. Focusing on three of Plato's dialogues—The Laws, The Republic, and The Statesman—Mark Blitz lays out the philosopher's principal interests in government and the strength and limit of the law, the connection between law and piety, the importance of founding, and the status and limits of political knowledge. He examines all of Plato's discussions of politics and virtues, comments on specific dialogues, and discusses the philosopher's explorations of beauty, pleasure, good, and the relations between politics and reason. Throughout, Blitz reinforces Plato's emphasis on clear and rigorous reasoning in ethics and political life and explains in straightforward language the valuable lessons one can draw from examining Plato's writings. The only introduction to Plato that both gathers his separate discussions of politically relevant topics and pays close attention to the context and structure of his dialogues, this volume directly contrasts the modern view of politics with that of the ancient master. It is an excellent companion to Plato's Dialogues.
Book Synopsis The Way of the Platonic Socrates by : S. Montgomery Ewegen
Download or read book The Way of the Platonic Socrates written by S. Montgomery Ewegen and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is Socrates? While most readers know him as the central figure in Plato's work, he is hard to characterize. In this book, S. Montgomery Ewegen opens this long-standing and difficult question once again. Reading Socrates against a number of Platonic texts, Ewegen sets out to understand the way of Socrates. Taking on the nuances and contours of the Socrates that emerges from the dramatic and philosophical contexts of Plato's works, Ewegen considers questions of withdrawal, retreat, powerlessness, poverty, concealment, and release and how they construct a new view of Socrates. For Ewegen, Socrates is a powerful but strange and uncanny figure. Ewegen's withdrawn Socrates forever evades rigid interpretation and must instead remain a deep and insoluble question.
Book Synopsis The Argument of the Action by : Seth Benardete
Download or read book The Argument of the Action written by Seth Benardete and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024-01-05 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together Seth Benardete’s studies of Hesiod, Homer, and Greek tragedy, eleven Platonic dialogues, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The Argument of the Action spans four decades of Seth Benardete’s work, documenting its impressive range. Benardete’s philosophic reading of the poets and his poetic reading of the philosophers share a common ground, guided by the key he found in the Platonic dialogue: probing the meaning of speeches embedded in deeds, he uncovers the unifying intention of the work by tracing the way it unfolds through a movement of its own. Benardete’s original interpretations of the classics are the fruit of this discovery of the “argument of the action.”
Book Synopsis Who Speaks for Plato? by : Gerald Alan Press
Download or read book Who Speaks for Plato? written by Gerald Alan Press and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2000 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays examine a crucial premise of traditional readings of Plato's dialogues: that Plato's own philosophical dialogues can be read off the statements made in the dialogues by Socrates and other leading characters. The text argues that no character should be read as Plato's mouthpiece.
Download or read book Philosophos written by Mary Louise Gill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-20 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Louise Gill presents a bold new explanation of the fact that the dialogue which Plato promised to write on the Philosopher, complementing the Sophist and the Statesman, is missing. Gill argues that he left it unwritten in order to stimulate his readers and encourage them to work out, for themselves, the portrait it would have contained.
Book Synopsis Philosopher in Plato's Statesman by : Mitchell Miller
Download or read book Philosopher in Plato's Statesman written by Mitchell Miller and published by Parmenides Publishing. This book was released on 2004-09-15 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Statesman, Plato brings together--only to challenge and displace--his own crowning contributions to philosophical method, political theory, and drama. In his 1980 study, reprinted here, Mitchell Miller employs literary theory and conceptual analysis to expose the philosophical, political, and pedagogical conflict that is the underlying context of the dialogue, revealing that its chaotic variety of movements is actually a carefully harmonized act of realizing the mean. The original study left one question outstanding: what specifically, in the metaphysical order of things, motivated the nameless Visitor from Elea to abandon bifurcation for his consummating non-bifurcatory division of fifteen kinds at the end of the dialogue? Miller addressed in a separate essay, first published in 1999 and reprinted here. In it, he opens the horizon of interpretation to include the new metaphysics of the Parmenides, the Philebus, and the "e;unwritten teachings."e;
