How do you feel about Plato?

on your point about the philosopher king, its obviously stupid. its based on the idea that if you want to create the perfect state based on justice you end up with this shit. its moreso about the soul than politics. secularization of his works causes people to view it as a promotion of authoritarian states. also, recall crito where he states that the athenian law of anyone being able to persuade the laws and change it is the most important law.

Well there was that whole debacle in Syracuse, so obviously Plato took the enlightened authority thing to heart to some extent.

You're missing the historic context: on Plato's time democracy was a mess that hinged on arbitrary, spur of the moment decision of the population. The philosopher king was a (failed and primitive, of course) to make amends with that and bring some kind of objective principle into the state.

was an attempt*

Yo frog, how is the universe not rational? When you go to school and pursue a degree in medicine, physics, or some earth science, what do they spend the majority of class time doing, if the universe and its laws cannot be understood? Do they teach you to posture and pontificate? Or do they just teach that the reasons behind things are unknowable and it is impossible to deduce meaning from them? I mean, I've been there, and they don't spoon feed you conclusions. Really it's just a lot of presenting information and leaving you to draw conclusions. As long as you can pass the exam. But if the student is not a brain dead nominalist, and is able to draw connections and notice relations between natural processes, even if they are not made explicit on paper or by the lecturer, you'll see where Plato was coming from. People are looking for the truth of the universe as if the noumena can be found printed on the pages of a philosophical text, or can be fashioned at will in a well formed argument on Veeky Forums.

Same here

He was right about democracy.

Everything he said was right.

Anyone here able to shed some light on his Theory of Forms to me? It seems as if it's directly connected to human intelligence as what one recognizes as 'appleness' is not only directly subjective to his own experiences with apples but will also change with time. We even know that recognizing similarities and pattern between different instances of one 'form' is a human evolutionary trait, therefore a metaphysical connection to another world of forms seems unlikely. I like the Theory of Forms but can't get over this. Thoughts?

>It seems as if it's directly connected to human intelligence as what one recognizes as 'appleness'

I think that inherent connection between a thing in-itself and our psychë is heavily implied in the Phaedo: 'So this is our position, Simmias? he said. If those realities we are always talking about exist, the Beautiful and the Good and all that kind of reality, and we refer all the things we perceive to that reality, discovering that it existed before and IS OURS, and we compare these things with it, then, just as they exist, so our soul must exist before we are born'

Damn, this is very enlightening...

well, not exactly. its an extremely complex affair that is pretty hard to explain in a Veeky Forums post. i suggest you look into plutarch's lives of dion. the gist is that plato was invited to teach the tyrant dionysius the younger by his uncle dion, who was a student of plato. a whole slew of messy political affairs happens where one guy overthrows the other only to be overthrown again. in the course of this, plato is nearly killed then kept against his will to teach then gets involved in a rebellion etc. the point is that there is an element of altruism here.

interestingly, he already had an altercation with doinysius the elder, the father of dionysius the younger, which had very similar outcomes for him.

imo, he only *somewhat* advocated the philosopher king as it was the only real way to advocate philosophy in greek society to the masses other than the socratic style of being a martyr for the cause. he was very much aware of the outcome of any philosopher who would speak his mind publicly and try to apply his beliefs in a real setting with what happened to socrates. a good deal of cautionary tip-toeing is present in his work due to this.

I hope you're not being sarcastic, I'm not very good at this.

I promise you I was not; as a matter of fact, I am re-reading Phaedo right now and I'm getting a much clearer picture of Plato's philosophy.

btw thanks

Ok, sorry. But you can never be sure on Veeky Forums.

bump

As someone with almost no patience or inclination towards philosophical speculation: he was a really good writer, and the character of Socrates as he delineated it has had more of an influence on me than that of any other figure from history.

>"I might not experience the greatest pleasure but at least I can experience more pleasure than pain by avoiding the risks" is a fucking stupid doctrine

You're the fucking stupid one for misapprehending something that is so clear in the dialogues. Moderation doesn't mean you desire a mediocre life with a moderate amount of happiness, it means you avoid excess in everything because excess in anything will cause problems. It's also a much more prominent idea in Aristotle than Plato, maybe you got them confused?

I've read his complete work + Cambridge companion to him + read a bunch of articles, short essays, and arguments about topics about his philosophy + his contemporaries (like Xenophon, some bits of Isocrates) and basically all the writers before him to get some context of his time and background; and I'm pretty confused about him and his philosophy as-well. It seems like the only people who don't trip over their own theories about his philosophy are those who specialize in researching and analyzing him, and that normal readers aren't going to fully comprehend him the first time around.

meant to reply to

He's a hack

He's basically reformulating Egyptian ideas, like Pythagoras did, and it's not a coincidence that Neoplatonism was born and thrived so well in Egypt.

Care to cite one Egyptian text that supprorts this claim?

Jokes on us. This post was written by a machine learning algorithm.

Read Black Athena.

>304 likes

i've seen that one before, the worst part is they don't just contain their bad opinions to the internet but loudmouth it to everyone they know in school.

Are you implying he's not right?

Plato didn't even manage to properly prove his very own "might makes right" strawman wrong.

and this is why idiots who are incapable of abstract thought shouldn't read Plato

that is such an old cartoon

>Moderation doesn't mean you desire a mediocre life with a moderate amount of happiness, it means you avoid excess in everything because excess in anything will cause problems.
You just rephrased the same thing. I got it from the Laws where he says what I criticised pretty explicitly.

>we don't live in a world that can be captured rationally

I'd like to kidnap cats like you and torture you into the truth. FUCK YOU! You're the cancer in the gut of the west you fuck sucking sophist. You will Phanta in R.E.I. as I chase you through the aisles with an ice pick. But will the same you that I hit with climbing gear be the same you that shits himself moments before? Who can tell? Nothing's real! Fuck you