Sponsored by the Larwill Lecture Series, the Department of Philosophy welcomes Nickolas Pappas.
Modern authors like Thoreau cast the philosopher as foreign even at home. In antiquity Socrates, who almost never left Athens, plays the part of a stranger there. Ancient stereotypes could cast a foreigner as either ignorant or possessed of secret knowledge, or uncertainly both at once. The role of the foreigner perhaps appears most dramatically in Plato's "Republic," precisely because foreignness persists in the reformed city that has defined itself as homogeneous. The cave story suggests how the governing philosopher, while committed to living in and as the heart of the city, nevertheless comes to it as if from elsewhere.