Philosophy and Gifted Students: “I don't want to do what the class wants to do.”

Abstract

The philosopher Aristotle was not given to witty one-liners, but in the Politics he says that a person who lives alone is “either a beast or a god.” Much later in the history of western thought, Thomas Hobbes (in Leviathan) describes the life of human beings when it is driven solely by desire and occurs outside of society as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”