Douglas Kries

Douglas Kries is a passionate advocate of reading carefully the "great books" of political philosophy. The authors he has focused on include Plato and Cicero, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Alfarabi and Maimonides, Rousseau and Tocqueville, and Jane Austen and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His teaching philosophy is summed up in a quotation attributed to Socrates: "I like to unfold the books that the ancients in their wisdom have left behind, and I go through them with my friends, and when we see something valuable we pick it out and consider it a great gain if we thereby become helpful to one another."