Following the second approach, Poetic Justice argues that the Republic neither endorses nor enforces fixed hierarchies in knowledge and politics but offers instead an education in ethical and political self-governance, one that prompts citizens to challenge all claims to authority, including those of philosophy.I recently finished reading an amazing book about Israel and Jewish history, written over 20 years before I was born. The first approach to learning to read aligns with philosophy as authoritative knowledge and politics as rule by philosopher-kings. Another, recommended by Socrates in the Republic, encourages trial and error and the formation of beliefs based on students’ own cognitive and sensory experiences. One approach treats literacy as a top-down affair, in which authoritative teachers lead students to true beliefs. At the center of these insights is the analogy in the dialogues between becoming literate and coming to know or understand something, and two different ways of learning to read. Jill Frank argues that there are unique insights to be gained from appreciating Plato’s dialogues as texts to be read-and reread. He wrote them in the 4 th century, when literacy was expanding.

Plato set his dialogues in 5 th century BCE, when written texts were disseminated primarily by performance and recitation.

Katzenstein and Seybert argue for a new approach to international relations, where the inclusion of protean power in our analytical models helps in accounting for unforeseen changes in world politics. Protean Power uses twelve real world case studies to examine how the dynamics of protean and control power can be tracked in the relations among different state and non-state actors, operating in diverse sites, stretching from local to global, in both times of relative normalcy and moments of crisis. It introduces the concept of ‘protean power,’ which focuses on the actors’ agility as they adapt to situations of uncertainty. In this ground-breaking work, Peter Katzenstein and Lucia Seybert depart from existing definitions of power that focus on the actors’ evolving ability to exercise control in situations of calculable risk. Mainstream international relations continues to assume that the world is governed by calculable risk based on estimates of power, despite repeatedly being surprised by unexpected change.

The source by james a michener