The present article is a plea for the value and the obvious relevance of reading in the formation of every generation of students and teachers. Reading brings us knowledge and it usually comes as a pleasant surprise. It helps us and it guides us in our quest for knowledge, especially when we break open different kinds of texts -- scientific,…

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."

Based on a reading of Basil's "Ad Adulescentes" and the epistles, it is clear that Basil finds moral value in Homer and Hesiod. The trickier issue is to what extent Basil uses Homer and Hesiod in his homilies. It seems that Basil does not abandon his respect for the utility of Hellenic "paideia" for the Christian in his…

In Plato's "Phaedrus," Socrates asserts that madness is a good thing if it comes from the gods, and demonstrates this using the example of love. Eroticism becomes thereby philosophy, the lover a philosopher, with Plato's Socrates serving as prototype. The question remains, however, how madness can be reconciled with a philosophical…

During the Middle Platonic period, from the second-century CE on, and in a more elaborately structured way from the time of Iamblichus (early fourth-century CE) on, the Platonist Schools of later antiquity took their students through a fixed sequence of Platonic dialogues, beginning with the Alcibiades I, concerned as it was with the theme of…

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is the most prominent figure in contemporary philosophical and literary debate. He originates a trend-breaking theory of deconstruction. He opines the persistence in west European philosophical tradition of what he labels is logocentric metaphysics of presence. He argues that the different theories of philosophy, from…

This article enquires into the curriculum advocated in the only ancient Greek treatise concerning education that has survived in its entirety, entitled "On the Training of Children." The treatise was highly influential in Europe from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, and thus exhibits certain assumptions concerning the purpose…

The purpose of this paper is to discuss whether higher education is a necessary good or evil from the perspective of happiness education. To review the paper systematically, four research questions are addressed. First, what is the purpose of higher education? Second, is higher education a necessary good? Third, is higher education a necessary…

An important part of making philosophy as a discipline gender equal is to ensure that female authors are not simply wiped out of the history of philosophy. This has implications for teaching as well as research. In this context, I reflect on my experience of teaching a text by medieval philosopher Christine de Pizan as part of an introductory…

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…

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,…

I have taught Plato's "Republic" for several years although seminars on this text can be difficult and pose certain challenges, most especially with first year students new to university: the ancient Greeks seem a long way from the technocratic society we live in today. More importantly, the complexity of our relationship to each other…

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…