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Ancient History and Latin Expert. Gill is a Latinist, writer, and teacher of ancient history and Latin. Updated March 28, Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Gill, N. Plato and Aristotle on Women: Selected Quotes. Timeline of Greek and Roman Philosophers. Plato and Aristotle on the Family: Selected Quotes. This was a city-sized machine for turning out great soldiers. Everything the Spartans did — how they raised their children, how their economy was organised, whom they admired, how they had sex, what they ate — was tailored to that one goal.
And Sparta was hugely successful, from a military point of view. He wanted to know: how could a society get better at producing not military power but eudaimonia? How could it reliably help people towards fulfillment? In his book, The Republic , Plato identifies several changes that should be made:. We need new heroes Athenian society was very focused on the rich, like the louche aristocrat Alcibiades, and sports celebrities, like the boxer Milo of Croton.
And bad heroes give glamour to flaws of character. These people would be distinguished by their record of public service, their modesty and simple habits, their dislike of the limelight and their wide and deep experience. They would be the most honoured and admired people in society. End Democracy He also wanted to end democracy in Athens. In doing so, he acknowledges his intellectual debt to his teacher and appropriates for his own purposes the extraordinary prestige of the man who was the wisest of his time.
That is because, following ancient testimony, it has become a widely accepted assumption that Laws is one of Plato's last works, and further that this dialogue shares a great many stylistic affinities with a small group of others: Sophist , Statesman , Timaeus , Critias , and Philebus.
These five dialogues together with Laws are generally agreed to be his late works, because they have much more in common with each other, when one counts certain stylistic features apparent only to readers of Plato's Greek, than with any of Plato's other works.
Computer counts have aided these stylometric studies, but the isolation of a group of six dialogues by means of their stylistic commonalities was recognized in the nineteenth century. It is not at all clear whether there are one or more philosophical affinities among this group of six dialogues—that is, whether the philosophy they contain is sharply different from that of all of the other dialogues.
Plato does nothing to encourage the reader to view these works as a distinctive and separate component of his thinking. On the contrary, he links Sophist with Theaetetus the conversations they present have a largely overlapping cast of characters, and take place on successive days no less than Sophist and Statesman. Sophist contains, in its opening pages, a reference to the conversation of Parmenides —and perhaps Plato is thus signaling to his readers that they should bring to bear on Sophist the lessons that are to be drawn from Parmenides.
Similarly, Timaeus opens with a reminder of some of the principal ethical and political doctrines of Republic. It could be argued, of course, that when one looks beyond these stage-setting devices, one finds significant philosophical changes in the six late dialogues, setting this group off from all that preceded them.
But there is no consensus that they should be read in this way. Resolving this issue requires intensive study of the content of Plato's works. So, although it is widely accepted that the six dialogues mentioned above belong to Plato's latest period, there is, as yet, no agreement among students of Plato that these six form a distinctive stage in his philosophical development.
In fact, it remains a matter of dispute whether the division of Plato's works into three periods—early, middle, late—does correctly indicate the order of composition, and whether it is a useful tool for the understanding of his thought See Cooper , vii—xxvii.
Of course, it would be wildly implausible to suppose that Plato's writing career began with such complex works as Laws , Parmenides , Phaedrus , or Republic. In light of widely accepted assumptions about how most philosophical minds develop, it is likely that when Plato started writing philosophical works some of the shorter and simpler dialogues were the ones he composed: Laches , or Crito , or Ion for example.
Similarly, Apology does not advance a complex philosophical agenda or presuppose an earlier body of work; so that too is likely to have been composed near the beginning of Plato's writing career. Even so, there is no good reason to eliminate the hypothesis that throughout much of his life Plato devoted himself to writing two sorts of dialogues at the same time, moving back and forth between them as he aged: on the one hand, introductory works whose primary purpose is to show readers the difficulty of apparently simple philosophical problems, and thereby to rid them of their pretensions and false beliefs; and on the other hand, works filled with more substantive philosophical theories supported by elaborate argumentation.
Plato makes it clear that both of these processes, one preceding the other, must be part of one's philosophical education.
One of his deepest methodological convictions affirmed in Meno , Theaetetus , and Sophist is that in order to make intellectual progress we must recognize that knowledge cannot be acquired by passively receiving it from others: rather, we must work our way through problems and assess the merits of competing theories with an independent mind.
Accordingly, some of his dialogues are primarily devices for breaking down the reader's complacency, and that is why it is essential that they come to no positive conclusions; others are contributions to theory-construction, and are therefore best absorbed by those who have already passed through the first stage of philosophical development.
We should not assume that Plato could have written the preparatory dialogues only at the earliest stage of his career. For example although both Euthydemus and Charmides are widely assumed to be early dialogues, they might have been written around the same time as Symposium and Republic , which are generally assumed to be compositions of his middle period—or even later. No doubt, some of the works widely considered to be early really are such.
But it is an open question which and how many of them are. Plato uses this educational device—provoking the reader through the presentation of opposed arguments, and leaving the contradiction unresolved—in Protagoras often considered an early dialogue as well. So it is clear that even after he was well beyond the earliest stages of his thinking, he continued to assign himself the project of writing works whose principal aim is the presentation of unresolved difficulties.
And, just as we should recognize that puzzling the reader continues to be his aim even in later works, so too we should not overlook the fact that there is some substantive theory-construction in the ethical works that are simple enough to have been early compositions: Ion , for example, affirms a theory of poetic inspiration; and Crito sets out the conditions under which a citizen acquires an obligation to obey civic commands.
Neither ends in failure. If we are justified in taking Socrates' speech in Plato's Apology to constitute reliable evidence about what the historical Socrates was like, then whatever we find in Plato's other works that is of a piece with that speech can also be safely attributed to Socrates. So understood, Socrates was a moralist but unlike Plato not a metaphysician or epistemologist or cosmologist. That fits with Aristotle's testimony, and Plato's way of choosing the dominant speaker of his dialogues gives further support to this way of distinguishing between him and Socrates.
The number of dialogues that are dominated by a Socrates who is spinning out elaborate philosophical doctrines is remarkably small: Phaedo , Republic , Phaedrus , and Philebus. All of them are dominated by ethical issues: whether to fear death, whether to be just, whom to love, the place of pleasure. Evidently, Plato thinks that it is appropriate to make Socrates the major speaker in a dialogue that is filled with positive content only when the topics explored in that work primarily have to do with the ethical life of the individual.
The political aspects of Republic are explicitly said to serve the larger question whether any individual, no matter what his circumstances, should be just. When the doctrines he wishes to present systematically become primarily metaphysical, he turns to a visitor from Elea Sophist , Statesman ; when they become cosmological, he turns to Timaeus; when they become constitutional, he turns, in Laws , to a visitor from Athens and he then eliminates Socrates entirely.
In effect, Plato is showing us: although he owes a great deal to the ethical insights of Socrates, as well as to his method of puncturing the intellectual pretensions of his interlocutors by leading them into contradiction, he thinks he should not put into the mouth of his teacher too elaborate an exploration of ontological, or cosmological, or political themes, because Socrates refrained from entering these domains.
This may be part of the explanation why he has Socrates put into the mouth of the personified Laws of Athens the theory advanced in Crito , which reaches the conclusion that it would be unjust for him to escape from prison. Perhaps Plato is indicating, at the point where these speakers enter the dialogue, that none of what is said here is in any way derived from or inspired by the conversation of Socrates.
Just as we should reject the idea that Plato must have made a decision, at a fairly early point in his career, no longer to write one kind of dialogue negative, destructive, preparatory and to write only works of elaborate theory-construction; so we should also question whether he went through an early stage during which he refrained from introducing into his works any of his own ideas if he had any , but was content to play the role of a faithful portraitist, representing to his readers the life and thought of Socrates.
It is unrealistic to suppose that someone as original and creative as Plato, who probably began to write dialogues somewhere in his thirties he was around 28 when Socrates was killed , would have started his compositions with no ideas of his own, or, having such ideas, would have decided to suppress them, for some period of time, allowing himself to think for himself only later.
What would have led to such a decision? We should instead treat the moves made in the dialogues, even those that are likely to be early, as Platonic inventions—derived, no doubt, by Plato's reflections on and transformations of the key themes of Socrates that he attributes to Socrates in Apology. That speech indicates, for example, that the kind of religiosity exhibited by Socrates was unorthodox and likely to give offense or lead to misunderstanding.
It would be implausible to suppose that Plato simply concocted the idea that Socrates followed a divine sign, especially because Xenophon too attributes this to his Socrates. But what of the various philosophical moves rehearsed in Euthyphro —the dialogue in which Socrates searches, unsuccessfully, for an understanding of what piety is?
We have no good reason to think that in writing this work Plato adopted the role of a mere recording device, or something close to it changing a word here and there, but for the most part simply recalling what he heard Socrates say, as he made his way to court. It is more likely that Plato, having been inspired by the unorthodoxy of Socrates' conception of piety, developed, on his own, a series of questions and answers designed to show his readers how difficult it is to reach an understanding of the central concept that Socrates' fellow citizens relied upon when they condemned him to death.
The idea that it is important to search for definitions may have been Socratic in origin. After all, Aristotle attributes this much to Socrates. But the twists and turns of the arguments in Euthyphro and other dialogues that search for definitions are more likely to be the products of Plato's mind than the content of any conversations that really took place. It is equally unrealistic to suppose that when Plato embarked on his career as a writer, he made a conscious decision to put all of the compositions that he would henceforth compose for a general reading public with the exception of Apology in the form of a dialogue.
The best way to form a reasonable conjecture about why Plato wrote any given work in the form of a dialogue is to ask: what would be lost, were one to attempt to re-write this work in a way that eliminated the give-and-take of interchange, stripped the characters of their personality and social markers, and transformed the result into something that comes straight from the mouth of its author?
This is often a question that will be easy to answer, but the answer might vary greatly from one dialogue to another.
In pursuing this strategy, we must not rule out the possibility that some of Plato's reasons for writing this or that work in the form of a dialogue will also be his reason for doing so in other cases—perhaps some of his reasons, so far as we can guess at them, will be present in all other cases. For example, the use of character and conversation allows an author to enliven his work, to awaken the interest of his readership, and therefore to reach a wider audience.
The enormous appeal of Plato's writings is in part a result of their dramatic composition. Even treatise-like compositions— Timaeus and Laws , for example—improve in readability because of their conversational frame.
Furthermore, the dialogue form allows Plato's evident interest in pedagogical questions how is it possible to learn? Even in Laws such questions are not far from Plato's mind, as he demonstrates, through the dialogue form, how it is possible for the citizens of Athens, Sparta, and Crete to learn from each other by adapting and improving upon each other's social and political institutions.
In some of his works, it is evident that one of Plato's goals is to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and that the dialogue form is being used for this purpose. The Parmenides is perhaps the clearest example of such a work, because here Plato relentlessly rubs his readers' faces in a baffling series of unresolved puzzles and apparent contradictions.
But several of his other works also have this character, though to a smaller degree: for example, Protagoras can virtue be taught? Just as someone who encounters Socrates in conversation should sometimes be puzzled about whether he means what he says or whether he is instead speaking ironically , so Plato sometimes uses the dialogue form to create in his readers a similar sense of discomfort about what he means and what we ought to infer from the arguments that have been presented to us.
But Socrates does not always speak ironically, and similarly Plato's dialogues do not always aim at creating a sense of bafflement about what we are to think about the subject under discussion. There is no mechanical rule for discovering how best to read a dialogue, no interpretive strategy that applies equally well to all of his works.
We will best understand Plato's works and profit most from our reading of them if we recognize their great diversity of styles and adapt our way of reading accordingly. Rather than impose on our reading of Plato a uniform expectation of what he must be doing because he has done such a thing elsewhere , we should bring to each dialogue a receptivity to what is unique to it.
That would be the most fitting reaction to the artistry in his philosophy. The bibliography below is meant as a highly selective and limited guide for readers who want to learn more about the issues covered above. Plato's central doctrines 2. Plato's puzzles 3. Dialogue, setting, character 4.
Socrates 5. Plato's indirectness 6. Can we know Plato's mind? Socrates as the dominant speaker 8. This Day In History. History Vault. Platonic Academy Around , the year-old Plato returned to Athens and founded his philosophical school in the grove of the Greek hero Academus, just outside the city walls.
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Peloponnesian War The two most powerful city-states in ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta, went to war with each other from to B. Marcus Tullius Cicero Greek philosophy and rhetoric moved fully into Latin for the first time in the speeches, letters and dialogues of Cicero B. Achilles The warrior Achilles is one of the great heroes of Greek mythology.
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