Discuss Rebecca Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex

On May 4, 2025, four of us continued our exploration of Rebecca Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex. Do historians put the ancient Greeks on a pedestal? After all, they thwarted two invasions of the Persian juggernaut, and their glorious founding is a story written by Homer that features the handsome but temperamental warrior hero, Achilles. Did the Ancient Greeks value glory over virtue? Underneath the Acropolis is a dark underside. Wealth came from the exploitation of slaves. Silver was extracted by slaves who were worked to death in dimly lit mines. Did their exceptionalism foster the way the Greeks viewed themselves? If ancient Athens had a Yelp review, it would list Socrates as street theater, performing daily without passing the hat. How do the city elders compare to Socrates’ just man, who has no enemies because he treats everyone fairly? How would they view a street performer taking the shine off their gleaming city by asking questions about virtue and justice? It ends with the trial and execution of Socrates for perverting the youth with his probing questions.

Goldstein, trained as a philosopher to evaluate philosophical propositions through logical analysis to determine their validity, notes that this approach strips away the emotions philosophers evoke in their arguments. She feels that when we read philosophy, we should converse with philosophers even if they were separated by centuries. For example, in the Republic, Thrasymachus interrupts the discussion on justice by proposing that power goes to the strongest. His assertion is reminiscent of Hobbes’ state of nature, which is overcome by a social contract that forges a Commonwealth with laws to protect its members. Suppose someone had the "Ring of Gyges," a mythical ring from Plato's Republic that grants its wearer the power of invisibility. Could the wearers get away with committing crimes without damaging their reputation, or would they destroy themselves by destroying their virtue? Is having virtue more important than having glory? These questions are echoed in Kant’s moral philosophy, which emphasizes duty and ethical obligations.
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Goldstein brings these philosophical conversations to life again by putting Plato at New York’s 92nd Street Y, which has hosted lively discussions on science, economics, society, and culture. In this fictional discussion, Plato is with Sophie Zee, author of The Warrior Mother’s Guide to Producing Off-the-Charts Children, Mitzi Munitz, who wrote Esteeming Your Child: How Even the Best-Intentioned Parents Violate, Mutilate and Descrate Their Children, and the moderator is Zachary Burns, a newspaper columnist.

From the title of her book, Zee pushes her child to be exceptional. Success is having a child with perfect SAT scores that enables the child to enter Harvard. In contrast, Munitz repairs the damage to the psyche of children whose parents have tried to mold their children without regard to their needs. After their introduction, Munitz asked if there is a difference between an authoritative and an authoritarian teacher. Can knowledge be transferred? Plato replies that teachers can inform students, but students become knowledgeable when the teacher kindles the emotions that foster understanding. Munitz thinks that adults erase a child’s autonomy, which could have given the child the strength to oppose authoritarianism. In response, Zee said an adult must be in the room to tell the child to put down the video game and learn the multiplication table. Without discipline, there will be a city of pigs, as described in the Republic, where individuals have only their basic needs fulfilled. Munitz counters with the allegory of the cave, where prisoners are chained and only see reality as shadows of puppets projected on the wall, until one breaks free and finds reality brightly illuminated by the sun. Yet when he returns to liberate the other prisoners, he finds they prefer the stories told by the shadows on the wall. Is the allegory of the cave apocryphal, where many prefer stories and even news projected on a screen, receiving information (or misinformation) without transforming it into knowledge? We may even see our life as a movie. There is even a radio station that promotes its music as the “soundtrack of your life.” As a star in your movie about your life, how would you choose to attain greatness, as posed by Shakespeare? Would you prefer to be born great, achieve greatness, or have greatness thrust upon you?

We invite you to continue our conversation about Rebecca Goldstein’s Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away, on May 17, 2025, from 2 PM to 4 PM using Google Meet, and share your insights on Plato and philosophy.