Siddhi's Blog

 I had picked up The Republic in August last year and only finished reading it in the beginning of January. Getting through this book has been an achievement for me. I procrastinated a lot because I was intimidated by the level of difficulty, but it was all worth it. I had come across Plato's theory of the Philosopher King when I was attending my Jurisprudence class and was so intrigued that I ended up getting into The Republic.  Let's talk about Plato. We all have heard about Plato and Socrates as the greatest philosophers. Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher. He was a student of Socrates. Most of his works reflect the ideas of Socrates and he is the main character of his dialogues. Plato authored about thirty-six dialogues. The Republic is his most renowned work. In Greek the title is understood as "Politeia" which can be rendered something closer to 'forms of government' or perhaps 'constitution'. The Republic is set in Athens. Socrates was sente...

 "Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is."  Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre is one of the most important philosophers of all time. Despite his work garnering considerable flak over the years, his theories on existentialism and freedom cement his place among the most influential Western philosophers of the 20th-century and beyond. Nausea is Sartre's first novel. I am not big with philosophy, but man do I love words and books! I picked up Nausea because first, it has a very curious title and second, I was looking for something short and interesting. Nausea is 100-something pages long. It is the diary of Antoine Roquentin.  Roquentin is a French writer and the narrator. He lives in solitude writing History related texts. In the book he interacts with two other characters regularly. One is the self-taught man and the other is a woman with whom the narrator sleeps with often. The self-taught man is an important character. He spends his time reading books, he reads t...