In this article, I interrupt in the exchange between Hugo Letiche and Nathan Snaza published in this same issue. What concerns me are a series of unsophisticated questions about method, including the repudiation of curriculum as method and syllabus, which I will initially refer to, and later endorse, as "the shitty curriculum."

Emily Hockley, of Cambridge University Press, and Margaret Bartley, of Bloomsbury Publishing, highlight the way that working directly with scholars, students and digital resources creators, through partnerships and collaborative relationships, has helped to frame the current form of their respective online platforms. While the focus of the debate…

I attempted to argue that, for Aristotle, art can be understood to have instrumental consequences directed toward external ends affecting ethical praxis. First, I considered the philosophical case that art, for Aristotle, affects ethical practice. Second, the non-philosophical literature related to some of the possible usages of art is sampled.…

I argue in this paper that the ability of art to express a holistic experience of life challenges the abstractness and formulaic tendencies of some philosophical ethics. The paper examines the presentation of death in three poet-playwrights--Sophocles's "Oedipus Rex," Shakespeare's "Hamlet," and John Donne's "Meditation XVII." Sophocles's…

We suggest that Book Five of the "Republic", where Plato discusses the status of women in the guardian class, is a superb source of Platonic insight. For it is precisely the discussion of women that is most vulnerable to co-optation by the modern vernacular of interest, a vernacular to which the "Republic" is vehemently opposed. If students come…

"Tragedy," both in what the author calls the strict and nuclear ancient Greek sense of the term (which does not imply that tragedy is clearly and distinctly defined, even in ancient Greece) and in the looser, derived sense of the word, has a long and compelling history. It is not only true that tragedy as practice and performance has a…

The contemporary university is an uncomfortable amalgamation of ambitions once held by a variety of educational institutions. It owes debts to the philosophical schools of Ancient Greece and Rome, to the monasteries of the Middle Ages, to the theological colleges of Paris, Padua, and Bologna and to the research laboratories of early modern…

The author started in the Ph.D. program in comparative literature at Princeton in 1992, a year after she graduated from college. She fell in love with mythology and the classical traditions and find herself teaching literature. In the remainder of her time at Princeton, she precepted for four or five more classes, got the chance to join the…

For a socially just community to occur, decision-making must employ respectful procedures that value input from representatives of all economic contexts. By considering philosophical roots of Western societal development, it is possible to gain insight into the systemic processes underlying these circumstances. By understanding these bases,…

The modern tendency to treat all Greek Golden Age textuality as apolitical and escapist has contributed to the ongoing neglect of the first Western educational text, Hesiod's "Works and days". Most commentators have missed the interplay of utopian and dystopian images in Hesiodic poetry for lack of the appropriate conceptual framework. Once the…

In Plato's "Meno," the overarching question is whether virtue can be taught, and as Socrates and Meno explore this subject, they are led to question the nature of teaching and learning in general. This paper is a textual analysis into what Socrates believes to constitute teaching in the "Meno," with the nature of learning also…

Examines the possibility for a textually grounded inquiry of Plato's "Gorgias" and "Phaedrus" that would probe the psychic investments intrinsic to discursive phenomena. Examines the impact of the confrontation with rhetoric as the "Other" of philosophy, and explores the relations among rhetoric, philosophy, and…

A teacher of gifted high school students looks at the large amount of murder, suicide, and violence in recommended reading lists for this group and concludes that though this literature should be read by students, teachers need to counterbalance it with happiness and hope. (DB)

A disturbing trend is developing in higher education which may jeopardize the quality and importance of the classical tradition in education. This trend is exemplified by demands that the liberal arts be made relevant and comprehensible to the student and that they be related in some way to the search for a good job. The great classical…

Sketches the life of Isocrates, the father of eloquence, and discusses his views on rhetorical education. (PD)