Name: Republic
ISBN: 9781494405519

Republic

The Republic is a Socratic dialogue, written by Plato around 380 BC, concerning the definition of justice and the order and character of the just city-state and the just man. The dramatic date of the dialogue has been much debated and though it must take place some time during the Peloponnesian War, "there would be jarring anachronisms if any of the candidate specific dates between 432 and 404 were assigned". It is Plato's best-known work and has proven to be one of the most intellectually and historically influential works of philosophy and political theory. In it, Socrates along with various Athenians and foreigners discuss the meaning of justice and examine whether or not the just man is happier than the unjust man by considering a series of different cities coming into existence "in speech", culminating in a city (Kallipolis) ruled by philosopher-kings; and by examining the nature of existing regimes. The participants also discuss the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the roles of the philosopher and of poetry in society.

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somenameformeOct 2026

If you don't see that Western democracies are headed towards revolution, then I think you must be keeping your eyes closed. The system matters much less than the leadership. Macron is at 16% approval, watching Celine Dion concerns while France burns. I'm not fond of petty political jabs, but the imagery of such was just too perfect to not mention. Germany's Merz has managed an absolutely remarkable 10% approval rating. Like how do you even get 90% of people to think you're doing a bad job? It's remarkable in a way.

Then there's the UK - I'm not even sure of who their latest leader is. They go through PM's faster than some people change their underwear, and they all rather smell like shite. In democracy the whole ideal is that you can pick another direction with new leadership, but when it's always the same crap with a difference face - you're eventually going to see things go boom. In the US we tend to have popular leadership, relative to Europe, but the sides are becoming so antagonistic and divided that we're basically a powder keg waiting for some sufficiently tumultuous event to set it off.

In general I think Plato's views are highly insightful, and strongly recommend "The Republic." In his view, systems are inherently cyclical, and all will repeatedly end - often in a rather unpleasant way, and transition to another system, eventually cycling back where they began only to begin the process again. This class warfare nonsense is meaningless to me. I couldn't care less about being a lord or a peasant. I want to raise my family, have a roof over my head, and frankly I don't need all that much more to be relatively content. People who want will never stop wanting, no matter how much they have. I find it a very sad way to live, and hopefully can instill the same values in my children.

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0xmattfJan 2026

I only read non-fiction; mostly philosophy. Here are some books off the top of my head:

* The Inner Citadel/Philosophy as a Way of Life by Pierre Hadot

* Plato's dialogues (someone already mentioned a few of them, but the Republic was missing from their list).

* Epictetus (Discourses and Enchiridion)

* The various essays/letters of Seneca

* Matter and Consciousness by Churchland (older, but fascinating)

* The Mediations of Marcus Aurelius

* (mostly) any Buddhist texts

* What a Plant Knows

* Moonwalking with Einstein

There are tons of fascinating books, way too many to list.

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madaxe_againOct 2025

I prescribe Plato - Republic, book X, specifically. How can one set of shadows on the wall be better than another, as they’re just shadows, degraded representations of the real?

Or perhaps Aristotle’s Poetics - pop culture has value because it is mimetic, and AI generated pop culture is no less a mirror, just one which produces reflections of every moment, all the time - but rather than the grand catharsis we might experience in a work of literature with well wrought characters with whom we empathise, we find the void staring into us as we do into it. Hollow art for hollow men.

Like it or not, the void is culture, and has value because it reflects us, albeit through a glass, darkly.

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DataDaoDeFeb 2025

The Old Man and the sea - Hemmingway - so many things, with every reread I find something new.

The Heart of the Buddhas Teaching - Thich Nhat Hanh, useful prayers, concepts for understanding and dealing with life and a moral compass for going through it.

The Way of Zen - Alan Watts, opened my eyes to different forms of religious experience

Also a lot of psychology and philosophy books in undergrad were foundational to my thinking. The Moral Animal, the Moral Landscape, The Blank Slate, The Republic and Plato’s writings on Socrates, Tao te Ching, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the Tanakh and parts of the Talmud, but many of these were more academic, still holistically they have shaped my thinking and moral compass.

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somenameformeDec 2024

Haha, you might want to look at the history of US-Mexico relations. If you're going to speak of historical things it's relevant that the relations there have an oddly large amount in common. Texas was a part of Mexico! A reasonable wiki page to start the crawl would probably be Mexican Texas. [1] You've got all the good stuff: ethnic conflict, weaponized migrations, separatist movements supported by a foreign government, brutal wars, annexation referendums, and so on. And Cuba indeed - one of the compromises at the end of the nuclear stand-off is that the US would stop trying to invade Cuba!

Reading Plato and other great philosophers is interesting (The Republic in particular is an amazing read) because they can often sound like prophets - predicting the future with such extreme accuracy at a time that ostensibly had basically nothing in common with ours. But I think their 'secret' is simply that they were great objective observers of the behavior of humanity. Because history is not especially creative, it keeps repeating itself endlessly, because humanity doesn't change except as a product of technology changing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Texas

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kstenerudOct 2024

Have Space Suit Will Travel (Heinlein)

Stranger in a Strange Land (Heinlein)

Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (one story in the book "Different Seasons" by Stephen King)

Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)

The Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)

Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky)

Frankenstein (Shelley)

Brave New World (Huxley)

Farenheit 451 (Heinlein)