Plato was 40 years old (388 B.C.), as he tells us in his “Seventh Letter.” The Peloponnesian War had ended in 404. The Greek colony of Syracuse on Sicily was in the ascendancy. Along with Sparta, ...

Ralph Waldo Emerson's theory of rhetoric has been the subject of ongoing inquiry that has moved Emerson further and further outside a line of Platonic thinkers in order to make his discussion of ...

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” —Martin Luther King Jr. “Stumbling is not falling.” —Malcolm X “In contrast to idealism, whose problem is how to explain ...

Warning: This graphic requires JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript for the best experience. In Philip Bump’s March 13 online column, “A quarter-century ago, we ...