Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These ...

As political philosophers of antiquity and of the Middle Ages remind us, the public life of the polis — politics — is necessarily a life in which conflict is ever-present. It may feel small comfort, ...

Public questions in America about science have become the playthings of the manufactured controversy, or “manufactroversy,” in which political activists invent a scientific disagreement that isn’t ...

The first major thinker to move to Athens from abroad was Anaxagoras. Arriving in 464 BC, he became a friend of Pericles and outraged religious opinion by claiming (correctly) that the sun was lit by ...

The first major thinker to move to Athens from abroad was Anaxagoras. Arriving in 464 BC, he became a friend of Pericles and outraged religious opinion by claiming (correctly) that the moon was lit by ...

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Letter news every morning. Sir, Janan Ganesh gets two things wrong in his column “We are all sophists now — or should be” (August 21).

If you’ve ever attended a high-energy seminar where a speaker yells, “unleash your greatness!” while pacing in an expensive suit reflective of poor fashion sense, congratulations – you’ve witnessed ...

In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous "really wise guys" made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts to "prove" the ...