Author: Roy Tsao
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Misremembering Plato’s Noble Lie
Back when I taught at Yale, I used to give a quiz about Plato’s Republic in the first class meeting for one of my upper-level seminars. The students were all supposed to have taken at least one prior course in which the Republic was read, and I wanted to see how well they remembered it. (I also…
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Hillary Clinton, Stephen Douglas, and the Logic of Success
Would liberals favoring Clinton over Sanders in 2016 have rooted for Lincoln’s opponent in 1858? My colleague Corey Robin wrote a column earlier this week on the fallacies and forgetfulness of liberal Democrats who continue to favor Hillary Clinton for the party’s Presidential nominee. At this point the liberal Democrat case for Clinton essentially comes down to the (dubious) notion…
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Thoreau the Revolutionary
1. In “Thoreau and the Tax-Collector,” I looked at Thoreau’s reasons, as stated in “Civil Disobedience,” for refusing to pay his poll-tax. My concern was to emphasize Thoreau’s political purpose, his understanding of the act as a practical step toward combating the evil of slavery. As I noted, this side of his argument in “Civil Disobedience” has often been slighted, when readers focus…
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Thoreau and the Tax-Collector
There’s a side of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” that I believe is often misunderstood – or maybe just misremembered. We remember his refusal to pay the Massachusetts poll tax, even at the cost of going to jail. But what is it that he hopes this act will accomplish, practically speaking? Perhaps that question seems…
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“Ex Machina” and Philosophy: Some Notes after Wittgenstein
1. In Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, the reclusive computer genius Nathan (Oscar Isaac) has called his next-generation internet search-engine Blue Book, after Wittgenstein’s notebook of that name. Hanging on a wall in Nathan’s secluded mountainside retreat is Gustave Klimt’s portrait of Wittgenstein’s sister, Margarethe. And that retreat is in Norway, where Wittgenstein had himself sought refuge…
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Coriolanus Before Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s chief source for his great Roman plays — Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus — was the writings of Plutarch, a Greek of the second century A.D. In the case of Coriolanus, Shakespeare drew solely, or nearly so, from Plutarch’s “Life of Caius Martius Coriolanus.” (He may also have taken a detail or two from the…
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“Democracy” by Henry Adams
Henry Adams’s Democracy: An American Novel, was first published anonymously in 1880. Its author never publicly acknowledged it as his work. (It goes unmentioned in Adams’s autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, published after his death in 1918). One hundred thirty-five years later, it retains its hold on readers’ imagination, a classic of U.S. political fiction. Just a few years ago, it was chosen…
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“I’ll Show You Differences”: Wittgenstein contra Hegel
“Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things that look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: ‘I’ll show you differences.’ [laughing:]…
ROY TSAO 