Jun 5, 2009

Notes Ancient & Modern

by Cliopatria

In a series that puts famous philosophical quotations in context, Brandon Watson treats George Santayana's"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Tom Holland,"Modernist minotaurs," TLS, 3 June, reviews Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism and Theodore Ziolkowski's Minos and the Moderns: Cretan myth in twentieth-century literature and art.

John Holbo,"Hey kids! Free Plato Book! And you can help me make it better!" Crooked Timber, 1 June, introduces us to his and Belle Waring's e-edition of Reason and Persuasion: Three Dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno and Republic, Book I.

Nicholas Guyatt,"Orchids and Lilacs: Darwin, Lincoln and Slavery," The Nation, 3 June, reviews Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Adrian Desmond's and James Moore's Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Nature, and Barry Werth's Banquet at Delmonico's: Great Minds, the Gilded Age, and the Triumph of Evolution in America.

Scott Saul,"Off Camera: Civil Rights in the North," The Nation, 3 June, reviews Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.

Ted Widmer,"High-Grade 'Renegade'," Washington Post, 3 June, reviews Richard Wolffe's Renegade: The Making of a President.

Finally, farewell to Arizona State's George Edward Paulsen, a student of American constitutional, diplomatic, and economic history.

More Comments:

Jonathan Dresner - 6/5/2009

I just love how you phrase it, Brandon: "not in any existing works of Plato." Just in case it comes from a lost Plato work and came to MacArthur without leaving a trace in history for the intervening two millenia.....

I'm not criticizing: it's precisely how an historian should put it.

The line sounds more like Homer than Plato, anyway: I could imagine a source, including MacArthur, mistaking one old Greek for another.

Brandon Scott Watson - 6/5/2009

The saying is definitely found in Santayana's Soliloquies in England (Soliloquy #25, "Tipperary"); and it is not in any existing works of Plato. Most of the misattributions are derived from MacArthur's speech, but as far as I know we still don't know whether it was a slip on MacArthur's part, or he had picked up the saying from a source that already misattributed.

Ralph M. Hitchens - 6/5/2009

Watson attributes to Santayana "Only the dead have seen the end of war." If memory serves, Douglas MacArthur in his famous "Old Soldiers" speech at West Point attributed this to Plato. Who's right?