Leo Strauss

some, such as German political philosopher Leo Strauss to view the Republic as an ironic work. Plato’s Republic should be read not as a political treatise, but instead as an extended city-soul analogy which provides an ancillary…

Power is not evil, it is the user that makes it evil. Machiavelli, a controversial figure in political history left a legacy of brutal reality which disturbed many people. Niccolo Machiavelli’s, The Prince explores the groundbreaking ideas for a prince to secure the leading position in government and retain his power and leadership. Human nature combined with power has the possibility of becoming tragically destructive. However, that wreckage stems from the environment, and the actions…

Thank you for providing me the space to explain why I want to pursue my PhD in Political Science. In this brief statement I will explain my major research interests, why I believe those areas are both academically and politically significant, and why I would like to attend your program. In my graduate studies I would like to pursue research on the role and influence of ancient political thought on early modern political thought and how that has shaped our contemporary political context. I am…

Three Messages From Republic 1-5 In depth analysis of three important messages from Plato’s Republic Philosophical texts are very important to humanity. They bring us to question what exactly what we are doing with our day to day lives. How the world affects us to bring change to our routines and why exactly this change is good or bad. Plato and Socrates are no different. Much of Socrates’ work is through the written texts of Plato, despite many historians believing that the dialogues of…

There are many competing notions regarding what it means to be human. As humans, we strive to get the most of this life, thus to live “the good life”. The question arises, what type of life brings us the greatest meaning? Many philosophers and thinkers have tried to answer this, and have composed strikingly different conceptions. Some of the most notable thinkers are Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Hobbes. Both try to provide the most accurate representation of the human being. Through…

Thomas Hobbes and Niccolo Machiavelli, both grappling with regional instability and constant war, arrive at different frameworks for handling man’s inherent propensity for conflict from very similar models of human behavior. Hobbes, watching his fellow countrymen fight each other during the English Civil War, decided that humans perpetually desire more power to secure their well-being and therefore incline toward warfare as a means to achieve this. Machiavelli, similarly accustomed to the…

Through their powerful renderings of war and politics, Niccolò Machiavelli's iconoclastic 1532 political treatise The Prince and Shakespeare's 1599 historical tragedy Julius Caesar mutually seek to explore the nature of human weakness. A manifestation of Machiavelli's radically realpolitik interpretation of Renaissance humanism, The Prince subverts the traditional Christian moral zeitgeist, redefining weakness in instrumental terms - that a leader's results are superior in importance to his…

Even Genius People can be Wrong (An Argument against three points in Plato’s The Republic) “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” (Vonnegut) Plato explains the perfect city and their perfect kind. He follows the idea of Vonnegut’s stable community and uses many different ideas to explain how to create this perfect city. Some of his best…

Greetings! I’m Neon but my close friends call me Ne. Before I get into too much detail, there are some things you should know about me. First of all, I weigh 20 amu; light, I know! I have been around for a while, for about 4.5 billion years, but no one knew of my existence because people don’t notice me; it’s so sad! Now into my life story. When a nebula helped form planet Earth, my friends and I were born. However, it took a long time, smart people and a lot of work to get us all free from…

Ariens are active, brave and frank. They possess an abundence of energy which renders them aggressive in all sorts of enterprises. Constantly on the go they are the pioneering go-getters of the Zodiac. It is the present challenge that counts not what happened yesterday or what the future may bring. They’re enthusiasm is contagious. While their outspokeness is sometimes hard to take it is ultimately accepted by friends and family who recognise that such frankness stems from the Rams honest…