Often, when thinking about Socrates (or about Plato’s depiction of Socrates), we need to remember that he is reacting to the Presocratics, but the re… - Catherine Rowett

Sophistry is one of the methods by which politicians dress up their policies in alien clothing, to pass them off as more desirable than they really are. Spin doctors thrive best where ‘democracy’ is the slogan.

Besides the ‘how many?’ question, Empedocles seems to be answering two other ancient questions: ‘How did the world come to be as it now is?’ and ‘How did it come to have the creatures that it now has?’. [...] His answers are subtle and intricate.

Parmenides did for science what Plato would later do for morality and aesthetics as well: he alerts us to the fact that opinions are just opinions, and they may differ widely. There may yet be a single truth, which need not be as anyone thought. To search for knowledge is to search for access to the truth, not to collect other people’s opinions, and philosophy conducts its unrelenting search for truth in the steps of Parmenides, by respecting sound and rigorous logical argument rather than the variegated tapestry of unexamined opinions.