M.F. Burnyeat

M.F. Burnyeat writes: Peter Loptson’s letter invites discussion of two ideas or issues which, he claims, Pythagoras is widely agreed to have contributed to the history of philosophy. Let me start with ‘psycho-physical dualist theory’. The idea is that Pythagoras, a believer in the transmigration of souls from one life to another, must have accepted a distinction between the psyche or soul and...

Charles Simic (Letters, 2 July) is right to see similarity between Plato’s ideas and Stalin’s. With characteristic effrontery, Plato actually cites great wickedness as proof that, given the right education, you can produce people with the talents and virtues needed to rule the ideal city: ‘It is the best endowed souls, is it not, who become outstandingly bad when they receive a bad education....

A printing error made my reply to Charles Fairbanks Jr (Letters, 8 October) say the opposite of what it meant. In my letter I wrote, and meant, the following: ‘My review does not say that Fukuyama himself is a conservative, let alone that Kojève was. On the contrary, I wrote, “there are signs in Fukuyama’s book that he is not firmly convinced that Kojève got everything right," implying that...