Word: plato
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Plato once said that the excellence or beauty of every structure is relative to the use for which the artist has intended it. In other words, an object must have a use before it can be considered beautiful and the greater degree of utility it has, the more beautiful it is. But art is only useful when it can become assimilated into the daily life of a person, when it can be taken from its silver platter and caten without the aid of knife and fork. And the only way in which any work of art is able to fulfill...
Every schoolboy knows that Socrates was an influential Greek educator who was condemned to drink hemlock for "corrupting" Athens' youth. For 2,300 years Socrates has been pictured, on the strength of Plato's description of him, as a highborn philosopher who lived ascetically, spent his time asking searching questions of Athenians in the market place, showed up the Greek Sophists, avoided politics and was eventually martyred by an ignorant mob for teaching his pupils idealistic notions of justice and authority...
Professor Winspear became suspicious of the Socratic tradition when he noticed that Socrates was described differently by Aristophanes than by Plato. In his satiric play, The Clouds, Aristophanes pictured Socrates as a ragged leader of the rabble, a Sophist, "a thoroughly subversive influence." Pondering this contradiction, Professor Winspear next noticed that The Clouds was produced in 423 B.C., when Socrates was 47 and Plato a child of six. He concluded that between 423 and about 400 B.C., when Plato knew him, Socrates changed, and that young Plato, who had a high contempt for the rabble, chose to overlook 70-year...
Professor Winspear concludes that the picture of Socrates by Plato, himself violently antidemocratic, was not a true one, but "the extremely adroit and facile plea of a partisan." He believes that the evidence "should make us very hesitant to accept the conventional explanation that a high-minded and guiltless philosopher fell an innocent victim to the . . . passions...
...that time Mr. Cassells had decided that consumers needed to know more than how to tell good peanuts from bad. Soon he had his students not only sallying forth on practice shopping expeditions and investigating advertising, but also studying economics, banking and even Plato's Republic...