Koukal By chance the 2016 presidential season found me teaching a course I regularly offer called “Person and Society.” The animating idea behind the course is to examine the relationship between different philosophers’ views of human nature so as to see how these views inform their thinking about how society should be ideally structured. The course begins with the study of selections from Plato’s Republic where he famously—or infamously, if you like—argues that the perfect society would be ruled by philosopher-kings. Pop Goes Punk Downloads. Needless to say, the candidacy of one Donald J. Trump made this an especially interesting read for the class. Many political commentators have drawn on the Republic to shed light on the 2016 election. The most prominent among these is Andrew Sullivan’s article “Democracies end when they are too democratic,” which was published in the New York Magazine in May 2016. Hindustan Ki Kasam Movie Hd Video Song Download.

In this piece and others like it, the authors draw primarily on Books VIII and IX of the dialogue, where Plato lays out his “cycle of regimes” that begins in aristocracy but which devolves through timocracy, oligarchy, and democracy before ending in tyranny. Emphasize the features of democracy that make it especially susceptible to demagoguery, which heralds the arrival of tyranny, and then go on to relate this to Trump’s political ascension. While these analyses are compelling, my students and I would like to report that the earlier parts of the work, particularly Book IV, can also tell us much about Trump and what his presidency will likely portend for the nation. This part of the dialogue deals with Plato’s conception of the soul or psyche, and how it relates to his ideal political state. Since Trump makes no effort to hide his oversized personality, this allows an opportunity to inspect it through Platonic eyes. What this inspection reveals is a very troubling state of affairs emanating from the man who is now seated in the most powerful and demanding political office in the land. But in order to fully appreciate this point it’s first necessary to lay out at least in outline Plato’s conception of a well-ordered society.