Plato's Cave: Thinking about Climate Change

Part of: The Political Imagination: Ancient Greek Ideas

In The Republic, Plato explores the predicament of the Cave: a passive citizen body, a conniving and self-interested set of sophistic opinion-formers and demagogic political leaders, a systematically misleading and damaging order of political structures and common beliefs and appetites.

Melissa Lane is a Professor of Politics at Princeton University.  Previously she was Senior University Lecturer at Cambridge University in the Faculty of History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.  She studied for her first degree in Social Studies at Harvard University, and then took an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.  She is an author, lecturer and broadcaster who has received major awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and Lucy Shoe Meritt Residency in Classical Studies at the American Academy of Rome. She has published widely in journals and authored or introduced nine major books including Greek and…