Plato was a divided soul. Torn between reason and passion, he gave birth to a philosophy marked by disconcerting duality. On the one hand, Plato was an artist and a poet: he encased his concepts in mystifying myths and slippery metaphors, worked out arguments in the form of dialogues rather than dry

Classical rhetoric, Clever, Contemplative, Homoerotic, Ironic, Mythic, Pioneering, Spiritual

All around the globe, dog-eared paperbacks sit on nightstands waiting to postpone their readers' rest. From the salacious to the literary, novels entertain and inspire with plots to follow and characters to root for. Though we take that dog-eared paperback for granted in the twenty-first century, suc

Charming, Epic, Medieval fiction, Pioneering, Sprawling

Oh, plagued no more with Human or Divine, To-morrow's tangle to itself resign, And lose your fingers in the tresses of The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine. The work of Omar al-Khayyam makes it pretty clear that Middle Eastern scholars were light-years ahead of their European counterparts durin

Enigmatic, Joyful, Loose, Mathematical, Medieval poetry, Pioneering, Smart

As the story goes, Don Quixote has read too many books about knights and experiences the world through the eyes of a valiant soldier. He is a hero and a fool. He is, simply speaking, insane. When Don Quixote encounters windmills, he sees giants and attacks them as any good knight would. As his

16th century (renaissance) literature, Epic, Funny, Hallucinatory, Huge, Layered, Parody, Pioneering, Playful