Sometimes, even the newest ideas have ancient roots. Take, for example, neoconservatism, the radical philosophy that supposedly guided the Bush administration’s ill-fated foreign policy decisions. Who ...

One of my less than admirable traits is to attempt to categorize and organize everything into its simplest terms. All too often, simple devolves to simplistic as I keep trying to pound an unwilling ...

Diogenes of Sinope, a beggar who lived on the streets of Athens in the fourth century B.C.E., has been hailed as the progenitor of performance art, an inspiration for the Occupy movement, and, by the ...

Plato, a pivotal ancient Greek thinker, profoundly shaped Western philosophy. A student of Socrates, Plato established the Academy, a pioneering institution. His ideas, including the Theory of Forms, ...

THE author of this ably written book is right in considering philosophy less as a body of results than as a mode of life. Owing probably to his wish to defend this conception, he restricts his inquiry ...

Socrates’ method was to clear his students’ minds of abstractions and assumptions, so that they might attain self-knowledge and learn the practical wisdom of living well. His pupil Plato, however, ...

Readers respond to a guest essay about the state’s effort to bar “officially disapproved ideas” from its university classrooms.