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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Thucydides

This Has Happened Before

06 Wednesday Aug 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Greek and Roman Tradition, Politics, Sophists

≈ Comments Off on This Has Happened Before

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21st century, Nicholas Thorne, Plato, Thucydides

Plaster cast bust of Thucydides. Photo by shakko, CC-BY-SA licence.

A few years ago I wrote about my old friend Nic Thorne’s book on Thucydides and Plato: how they both address the failure of an old social order and the people who show its inadequacies. In Plato’s work, the nihilistic Sophists Callicles and Thrasymachus are worse people than their more genteel predecessors, but they understand the old order’s failings much better than those predecessors do. That claim strongly suggests parallels to our own chaotic age, but the book leaves those parallels unstated.

Now, I’m happy to report, Thorne has a new “limited-edition” Substack, entitled This Has Happened Before, devoted to making those parallels to our age explicit. What do Thucydides and Plato have to teach us about the 21st century? Check out the Substack. Political views expressed there are his and not mine – we have plenty of areas of disagreement – but I recommend checking it out if you’re interested in lessons that history might give us about our crazy era.

What we learn from the negative moments in Plato and Thucydides

05 Sunday Dec 2021

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Friends, Greek and Roman Tradition, Hope, Politics, Sophists

≈ 12 Comments

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20th century, 21st century, autobiography, G.W.F. Hegel, James Doull, Karl Marx, Nicholas Thorne, Plato, Socrates, Thrasymachus, Thucydides

My oldest friendship is with Nicholas Thorne, whom I met in the 1970s. That’s not a typo, even though he and I are in our mid-40s; the friendship began, so our parents say, when he crawled up to my house’s doorstep, before we were old enough to walk. He is probably the one who most sparked my interest in philosophy, when he studied in James Doull’s Hegelian department at Dalhousie University and was delighted by what he found. It was through him that I found my lifelong interest in Hegel. Eventually, both of us got our PhDs in philosophical fields but, as is so typical for our generation and those after, neither of us found long-term full-time faculty work.

Nevertheless, we both kept up our passion for philosophy and kept writing. I’m delighted that Thorne has now published a book, Liberation and Authority, and I’m pleased to review it here.

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