Is There Anything Left Behind?

David Frum: If you start paying attention every time Aristotle says it seems, there's nothing left. And the difficulty is, is when you have centuries of scholarship that have been developing to unwind yourself so radically from a text is very, very difficult. Can I add one example? No, I'll make it. From Plato's trilogy, the Aetetus office statesmen. It's a sophist that turns out to be all the different defective statesmen who don't have a science of statecraft. All the laws turn out to be a kind of sophistry or deceptive images.