A Case for Platonic Virtue in Governance of the Post-National World

Historians such as Livius and Tacitus thought that they witnessed in their own time a long descent from virtue and freedom, and if the long descent from the ancient idea of virtue was already noticed in the 1st century CE, then what can it be said about it today?

In this lecture we will look at how Thomas Taylor, English Platonist translator, through Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott, inspired the flowering of Platonism in America’s Middle West in the form of Transcendentalism. The retrieval of ancient philosophy in the Midwest and North East of America was a main preoccupation for Dr. Hiram K. Jones of the Concord School of Philosophy, Thomas M. Johnson, founder of the journal The Platonist (1881) and others who made consistent efforts to establish a defence for intelligible ideas in contrast to the prevailing materialist conceptualism.

In this online lecture, we revisit key philosophical figures in ancient Western wisdom traditions, as they continue to inform our findings across multidisciplinary domains with their relevance in emerging views on “universal values and practical global constitutionalism”.

Speaker: Adina Bezerita, FRSA, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, is a philosopher and scholar (Oxford-Cambridge), founder of Numinous Threads (2016), to research, develop and present innovative projects in ancient wisdom relevant across the humanities and sciences with an impact on higher education, leadership and governance oriented on meaningful social progress. Adina is an honorary advisor to the Romanian Government Ministry for Research, Innovation and Technology (MCID) and a global ambassador for Northwestern University (NU), USA.