Plato

3 units

An examination of some of Plato's most important dialogues, typically including the Gorgias, Phaedo, and Republic, with the aim of grasping the development of Plato's most influential thoughts in ethics and in metaphysics and epistemology. In order to provide both historical understanding and philosophical evaluation, attention will be paid to the context and structure of the dialogues and to the best of recent secondary literature. The point of the course is to provide a survey by which advanced undergraduates and graduate students can become acquainted with or deepen their acquaintance with Plato, an author who more or less invented philosophy as we understand it and who still stands above us all. As Bernard Williams has written, "It is pointless to ask who is the world’s greatest philosopher: for one thing there are many different ways of doing philosophy. But we can say what the various qualities of great philosophers are: intellectual power and depth; a grasp of the sciences; a sense of the political, and of human destructiveness as well as creativity; a broad range and a fertile imagination; an unwillingness to settle for the superficially reassuring; and, in an unusually lucky case, the gifts of a great writer. If we ask which philosopher has, more than any other, combined all these qualities—to that question there is certainly an answer, Plato." (“Plato: The Invention of Philosophy,” in The Sense of the Past, ed. M.F. Burnyeat [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006], pp. 148-186, at 179-180) Accordingly, as we try to come to grips with Plato, we will be trying to come to grips with philosophy itself, how to do it. This semester, the centerpiece will be, as it must be, Plato’s Republic, the core of which is a question of ethics but which also includes important speculation about politics, psychology, general ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics. But we will also have a thematic focus, to track Plato’s conception of philosophical ethics, that is, how Plato thinks about how to settle how a person should live. (How!) Plato inherited from Socrates an obsession with the question of how we should live, and he inherited from Socrates the broad answer that we must be philosophers to live well. But how exactly are we supposed to philosophize, and how exactly is that supposed to help us live well? We will set up these questions (and start trying to answer them) by studying the Apology of Socrates, the Euthydemus, and Diotima’s teaching in the Symposium, before we turn to the Republic. Then, after we have followed the Republic’s wide-ranging tour, we will tackle the Philebus, which extends Plato’s re>lections on pleasure, knowledge, and the good life.