At our next Western Civilization meeting, we'll discuss the Greek philosopher Plato. The suggested readings for this meeting are Books VI and VII of "The Republic".
Plato is the first person discussed in Volume I of Columbia University's "Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West"l, which we are using as one of our reading lists. Below is their brief biography of the philosopher:
"Plato (427?–347? B.C.) was born in Athens, the son of noble parents. As the pupil and friend of Socrates (469–399 B.C.), Plato adopted his tutor's technique of conversational questioning (dialectic); indeed, it is largely through the writings of Plato that we have any records at all of Socrates, for he left no known manuscripts and perhaps expressed himself only in talk with his students. Socrates was condemned to death for alleged impiety. Probably this was one of several reasons that influenced Plato to avoid an active political career and instead to found, in 387 B.C., his Academy in Athens, where he taught mathematics and philosophy. His work there was interrupted by two abortive efforts late in life to achieve a practical realization of his political ideals in Syracuse, a Greek city-state on the island of Sicily. "
"Plato wrote nearly thirty works in forty years, using the dialectical method. "
"Among his early works are the Apology and Crito, concerning Socrates, and Ion, an investigation of the source of poetic ability. As he began to develop his views more explicitly, Plato wrote Phaedrus, a treatise on rhetoric, which contains his principal notions on the contemplation of the ideal. There followed Gorgias, on absolute morality, and Meno, on the acquisition of knowledge. Other works continued to dramatize opposing arguments as in the early Socratic dialogues. Symposium is on the love of beauty; Phaedo on immortality; The Republic, an attempt to reconcile moral theory and political practice in the concepts of the ideal of justice and the rule of philosopher-kings.
In his Seventh Epistle Plato says that his philosophy has never been put into words and never will be. It is, indeed, difficult to summarize Plato's philosophy, or even briefly to sketch the system of thought he created as a setting for the moral faith of his older friend Socrates. Plato's writings include some of the boldest speculation in the history of philosophy; and his theories of knowledge, of love, nature, and human destiny; his political, moral, and psychological constructions; and his doctrine of Forms—implying as it does a vision of the universe at once moral and mathematical, aesthetic and rational—have stimulated, and often intoxicated, a hundred generations of thinkers. One such thinker, Alfred North Whitehead, has said, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
