- April 2023 marked two years since Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno seized power and declared himself head of the Transitional Military Council (Conseil Militaire de Transition, CMT) following the sudden death of his father, Idriss Déby Itno, president of Chad since 1990. A new draft constitution proposed by the transitional government was adopted in June by 96 percent of the members of the National Transitional Council (Conseil National de Transition, CNT), which replaced the National Assembly when it was dissolved after Idriss Déby Itno’s death. A public referendum on the new constitution was scheduled for December at time of writing. Presidential elections are scheduled for 2024.
- Socrates (plato.standford.edu)
The philosopher Socrates remains, as he was in his lifetime (469–399 B.C.E.), an enigma, an inscrutable individual who, despite having written nothing, is considered one of the handful of philosophers who forever changed how philosophy itself was to be conceived. All our information about him is second-hand and most of it vigorously disputed, but his trial and death at the hands of the Athenian democracy is nevertheless the founding myth of the academic discipline of philosophy, and his influence has been felt far beyond philosophy itself, and in every age. Because his life is widely considered paradigmatic not only for the philosophic life but, more generally, for how anyone ought to live, Socrates has been encumbered with the adulation and emulation ordinarily reserved for religious figures – strange for someone who tried so hard to make others do their own thinking and for someone convicted and executed on the charge of irreverence toward the gods. Certainly he was impressive, so impressive that many others were moved to write about him, all of whom found him strange by the conventions of fifth-century Athens: in his appearance, personality, and behavior, as well as in his views and methods.