8/10. A very good novel. Playful language of often Nabokovian precision and inventiveness. Tragic and fun, beautiful and disgusting, compelling and un...
Yeah this is good stuff. I didn't think primarily of factionalism so much as power vs persuasion, irrational vs rational, etc., but it's a good exampl...
I think so, because the idea of a literary Easter egg doesn't do justice (no pun intended) to the kind of subtlety that Plato is using. What we have n...
I've done some thinking and now I have a slightly different angle. I see that while I started out with a good intuition, it went a bit wrong on its wa...
I agree with the second and third sentences here. I was attempting to identify a literary foreshadowing or a literary easter egg. I probably need to b...
Your point is broadly good, but Socrates does on the surface mean to show that Simonides and other wise men could not have --- or at least probably di...
Sure, but even with all that there's the suggestion of complacency, especially when you take his son's conversation into account too. Thrasymachus is ...
Various commentators suggest that he is a somewhat contemptible figure (e.g., Annas), and @"Fooloso4" is less than complimentary here (the source of m...
Well, everything in Book 1 is relevant to the rest of the work, so even though I'm focusing on a particular passage there, I'm not intending to restri...
Thank you for your contribution, which is informed and interesting. The point about inheritance is particularly good — I hadn't thought about that muc...
I don't think we get an indication that Socrates hopes old age will be a more reflective time of life. The point is different. When Cephalus says that...
Implying (unintentionally) that philosophy is only good when you're old and have nothing better to do, hardly something that would enamour him to Socr...
It should be noted that what I'm interested in here is a side-issue. Many introductions and guides don't even mention it, so it's not important for re...
Thank you. It is rather perplexing, yes, and only gets more perplexing the closer you look. The last time I read it, a long time ago now, I read it to...
Guilt by association, yes, and several levels of it: (1) the definition is suspect because it came from these bad guys; (2) Polemarchus is ignorant or...
Against that interpretation, it turns out (I should have checked before) that while Simonides was a poet, the other wise men mentioned — Bias and Pitt...
I always have to ask lots of "are you sure about x, because I thought it was y" kind of questions, whereupon it'll often say oh sorry, you're right — ...
Quick note: invertebrates (including insects) are animals according to standard use. That's the use I'm most familiar with, though of course I'm aware...
Here is an obscure flag: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Flag_of_Volga_Germans_%28version%29.svg/1024px-Flag_of_Volga_German...
I concede. :clap: My own history of early life as the scion of a venerable family of the nomenklatura in Nizhny Novgorod, yearning to be an Englishman...
It seemed like such a triumphant feat of self-creation that I'm disappointed you lapsed back into your Georgian backwoods identity. It's your life of ...
I am imagining, rather than the Two Minutes Hate, a daily Two Minutes and Twelve Seconds Dance, in which everyone must dance to Tequila by The Champs,...
It can be useful to define subsidiary terms but it's unreasonable to define terms that are central to the debate, since their meaning is what the phil...
Add this: Any doctrine of method, in common with all other doctrines, is up for philosophical debate, thus it can never be primary without closing dow...
Those foods are not fancy. This morning I had a bacon roll, or as they say here, a roll and bacon, which specifically implies a Scottish morning roll,...
Toasted crusty white bread rubbed with garlic and mounted with tahini yoghurt (which included olive oil, lemon juice, and Herefordshire honey), fresh ...
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