Plato | ZETEO

Plato’s Shaggy and Sly Victory

May 23, 2016 by William Eaton

A comparison with a shaggy dog tale—with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”—may help us appreciate and begin to think about an “elusive passage” in Plato’s Symposium. In Twain’s text, the narrator goes seeking news of the Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley and ends up hearing stories about an inveterate gambler named Jim Smiley. In Plato’s case, Apollodorus, who was not at a wonderful party many years prior, tells what he has heard about this party from Aristodemus, who […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: competition, eros, love, Mark Twain, Plato, Socrates, Symposium, theater

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Reading First Sentences

September 15, 2013 by William Eaton

A Week of Reading from . . . William Eaton, Zeteo Executive Editor [One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading. This one was first posted 15-21 September 2013.] 15 September 2013: K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality As this is a season for reading manuscripts that are being submitted for Zeteo’s Fall 2013 issue [see current Call for Papers], I have become interested in first sentences and what one can learn from them. So I want […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: American Revolution, Ancient Greece, bees, dreams, Eichmann, Freud, Gatsby, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, sexuality

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Reading: 7 July-13 July 2013 ZiR

July 7, 2013 by William Eaton

William Eaton, Zeteo Editorial Adviser [One in an ongoing series of posts. For the full series see Zeteo is Reading.] 7 July 2013 Reading various things in the process of preparing an essay on Plato’s dialogue Lysis, the foremost subject of which is φιλία (philia), which in this context has traditionally been translated as “friendship.” Thus a week of readings related to friendship beckons. A first bit—or salvo—from a journal entry of Thoreau’s, November 3, 1858: Nothing makes me so dejected as […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: Aristotle, cancer, desire, evil, friends, friendship, Ian Craib, Plato, success, Thoreau

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Wittgenstein and Darwin’s Crab Soup

May 1, 2013 by William Eaton

[print_link] [email_link] Do you know, is the crab soup vegetarian? And of what uses are words if their meanings are bent by their use? And could comic philosophy be our last best hope? By William Eaton It could be teasing to begin this way, but . . . The last few months I have been working now and again on an essay about sex and philosophy, and it has seemed to me that the word “pleasure,” if not […]

Categories: Essay, Spring 2013 Issue • Tags: Darwin, evolution, Marx, meaning, Orwell, philosophy of language, Plato, vegetarianism, Wittgenstein

What the Market Will Bear, Occupy Wall Street poster by Roger Peet

The Scandal of Democracy

April 11, 2012 by William Eaton

The Scandal of Democracy Chaotic Thoughts on the Occupied Squares By Pablo Bustinduy Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all — Hesiod, Theogony (II 116) Zeteo asked me to write a piece about the relations between Occupy Wall Street and the 15M, a political movement which erupted in Spain a few months before the events of New York. What follows, however, is not a list of affinities and discrepancies between […]

Categories: Essay, Spring 2012 Issue • Tags: chaos, democracy, Dewey, Hesiod, Occupy Wall Street, Plato, Spain

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Philosophy and Death

June 10, 2010 by William Eaton

Philosophy and Death; Philosophy as Divertissement Continuing to Learn from the Phaedo and Pascal By William Eaton [Click for pdf] Originally published in The Conversation, the City University of New York Liberal Studies journal that evolved into Zeteo. William Eaton became the Editorial Adviser to Zeteo; his explorations of the here and now have been appearing Tuesday evenings at montaigbaktinian.com. * * * The setting of the Phaedo, the dialogue of the soul in the shadow of imminent death, […]

Categories: Archives, Article • Tags: death, knowledge, Pascal, Plato, Socrates