Socrates Archives - Public Seminar

Philosophy

Martha Stewart’s Tripartite Soul

The ambitious Martha Stewart would never want to go to prison. The spirited Martha Stewart is willing to negotiate.

April 14, 2025 • by Anabelle Helsell

Anabelle Helsell on how the collapse of the personal and public in Martha Stewart's career echoes the warnings of Plato’s Republic....

Music

Taylor Swift, the Modern Alcibiades

We think we know who the pop star is. But does Plato know better?

February 27, 2024 • by Jack Condie

Much ink has been spilled on whether she’s a feminist hero or ruthless capitalist villain. I think she’s a modern day Alcibiades. ...

Kinships

Living with wrongdoing

February 21, 2024 • by Helga Varden

Hope for the future is only possible if we choose peace by stopping the killing and resist the temptation of avenging heroism....

Philosophy

Where do thoughts of death lead?

September 20, 2023 • by Gwenda-lin Grewal

Barbie is forever denied the awkward self-consciousness that makes possible both ambition and disappointment. ...

Patrick J. Deneen’s Regime Change and the Meletus option

May 16, 2023 • by Geoffrey Kurtz

Deneen invokes Machiavelli, but at a deeper level his model is Meletus: the whole class of “ordinary people,” all of them, have the right political instincts, and only the liberal “ruling elite,” like the deplorable Socrates, is corrupting the American polity....

Activism

Future Anterior Witness

Women’s Voices Narrating Black Death

February 16, 2023 • by Julie Beth Napolin

Facebook's censorship of documented violence points to a boundary in public life: death is not meant to be livestreamed....

<strong>Future Anterior Witness</strong>

Social Research

Take Me Out with the Crowd

On loneliness and Hannah Arendt

February 16, 2022 • by Christian Sheppard

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism tells the true crime story of the twentieth century. Contrary to the basic requirements of human condition, Loneliness is one of the fundamental experiences of human life. ...

Philosophy

What Did Aristotle Think About Slavery?

Why we need to read great books closely

August 27, 2020 • by Steven B. Smith

I admire Professor Collard’s attempt to defend Aristotle despite his views on slavery. My question is whether he actually held the views she attributes to him. We must avoid two common responses that seem to me misguided. The first is to reject Aristotle out of hand because his views do not ...

Politics

Expendable Bodies

What Sophocles can teach us about our political moment

June 25, 2020 • by Daniel Schillinger

An ancient Greek tragedy, Sophocles’s Philoctetes, can help us to think holistically about our own political moment. What Sophocles shows us is that the same bodies the polity dominates, annihilates, or consigns to suffering in isolation it also tends to use for its own ends. That political communities too often view ...

Public Health

Radical Hope Amid Catastrophe

When a collective culture is threatened with collapse, so are the reference points for defining a good life.

May 14, 2020 • by Vafa Ghazavi

At a Christian Dior factory outside Paris, machines that once filled ornate vials with luxury fragrances are filling plastic bottles with hand sanitizer destined for public hospitals. Men and women who were dossing down on London’s streets have begun sleeping in rooms of the InterContinental Hotels Group after the city’s mayor negotiated a way ...

Feature

How Socrates Can Help Psychotherapists

When two minds meet like steel striking flint

January 30, 2019 • by James Overholser

As the field of psychotherapy focuses more on treatment manuals and the regimented nature of clinical research, the practice risks losing the subtle nuances that guide the interactive fluidity of therapy sessions. Can clinicians combat this loss by incorporating ideals from ancient philosophy into contemporary psychotherapy? In The Socratic Method of ...

Feature

How To Do Things Without Words

Silence as the power of accountability

June 28, 2018 • by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

A jarring phenomenon of the Trump presidency is that words are cheaper than they’ve ever been in my half-century-long life. Yet behind this cheapness, silences appear, difficult and important to feel. There is the silence of an estimated 4,645 deaths in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria. There’s the ...