Download

Download Full Text (1.6 MB)

Description

Once upon a time, there was a very unbeautiful and thoroughly repulsive island. Set in a boiling sea of menacing and disgusting sea creatures, this rotten island made itself home to a great array of ugly monsters of every deformity and every threatening appendage imaginable who behaved in ways that matched their ugly appearance. One day, quite unexpectedly, a beautiful flower appeared on this rotten island. This flower frightened and repulsed the island’s hideous and evil inhabitants. Rotten Island invites us to ask whether Plato is right in supposing that the beautiful is the enemy of evil and the cause of the good. Might beauty in a classroom, or an office, or a bus station, have any effect on the people who study or work there, and on the way they think of themselves and treat those around them? Steig’s story is like the myths Plato puts in his dialogues to help make his philosophical points.

Publication Date

2000

Publisher

Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children

City

Montclair

Keywords

beauty, evil, fables, goodness, ugliness, Plato, myths

Comments

This review was originally published in Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 15(2): 1, 2000.

<em> Rotten Island</em> (1992) by William Steig

Please consider a small donation to the IAPC.

Share

COinS