William H. F. Altman

Having been persuaded by Plato’s Republic that justice requires the philosopher “to go back down into the Cave,” I have devoted my professional life to the cause of public education, presently as a Latin and world history teacher at E.C. Glass High School in Lynchburg, Virginia. Born in Washington D.C., with degrees in Philosophy from Wesleyan University, the University of Toronto, and the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, I have been a public high school teacher in Vermont, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Virginia and have taught History, Social Studies, Philosophy, English, Drama, and Latin. I began publishing scholarly articles in Intellectual History, Classics, and Philosophy in 2007, and Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic, the first volume of my study of the reading order of Plato's dialogues, was published by Lexington Books in 2012 (see review in BMCR). Lexington is also the publisher of "a German Trilogy," the last volume of which, The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism, appeared in 2011. Its first two parts, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich and Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration were published together in October, 2012; at present, I am working on Cicero. Fascinated by the devastating impact of the First World War on modern intellectual life, I am also writing a trilogy of novels of which the first, Kipling’s Sons, is now complete. Since 2014 will mark the centennial of the Great War, I am presently seeking a Literary Agent interested in this timely project. My wife Zoraide and I divide our time between the United States and her native Brazil. I have two sons: Philip and his wife Erin teach at the American College in Sofia (Bulgaria), and Elias, who lives in New York City, is an Associate Editor at Lapham's Quarterly.