My First Plato: Life, Thought And Works Of The Great Philosopher

By ENRICO VALENTE

The series “Meetings with the philosophers” is proposed to present to the lay public the life, thought and the works of the greatest philosophers of all time. The themes are faced with a simple, but rigourous language, basically adapted to anyone. The objective is to provide the reade with the essential cognitive tools to understand the basic features of the works of the author considered as well as the thoughts produces on the authors that they followed after. In this work we present the thought of Plato: the theory of ideas, political theory, knowledge, dialectic, arts, rhetoric, love, and a few myths among which the most celebrated such as the myth of the cavern and the myth winged chariot.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tektime
• Release date: Jul 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9788835438274

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION

2. LIFE

3. THE FIRST DIALOGUES

4. THE THEORY OF IDEAS

HYPERURANION AND THE CONCEPT OF IDEA IN PLATO

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE WORLD OF THE SENSES AND THE WORLD OF IDEAS

5. KNOWLEDGE OF IDEAS

THE THEORY OF REMINISCENCE

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

TRUTH AND OPINION

PASSIONS, OBSTACLE TO TRUTH

6. THE MYTHS OF PLATO

THE WINGED CHARIOT

THE MYTH OF THE CAVE

THE MYTH OF THE ANDROGYNE

THE MYTH OF THE DEMIURGE

THE MYTH OF PROMETHEUS

THE MYTH OF THEUTH

7. THE IDEAL STATE

JUSTICE

THE JUST STATE

THE THREE PARTS OF THE STATE

PLATONIC COMMUNISM

THE EDUCATION OF GOVERNORS

THE DEGENERATIONS OF THE STATE

8. SCIENCE AND IMMITATIVE ART............................................................................................

9. RHETORIC........................................................................................................................... ...

10. DIALETICS...........................................................................................................................

11. ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE.................................................................................................

12. TO BE AND NOT TO BE, THE ERROR .................................................................................

13. GOOD FOR MAN..................................................................................................................

14. THE LAWS.............................................................................................................................

15. RELIGION AND COSMIC ORDER ....................................................................................

16. PLATO IN HISTORY..........................................................................................................

1. INTRODUCTION

Introducing Plato, and, mostly, being able to do so concisely, is a difficult undertaking, to say the least, because in him we recognize one who was probably the most important and influential philosopher of antiquity. His ideas and his theories will be the themes that practically all thinkers who come after him will have to deal with. And they will do so to criticize him, to surpass him, to praise him, to confirm their own ideas or to find fault with those of others. For this reason, no scholar who wishes to undertake the long path of the history of philosophy can ignore approaching his thought.

To understand Plato adequately philosophically, we must start with two important premises. The first is that his thought is characterized by a basic intention, an imperative requirement, that is, by the will to remove all traces of relativism that were so dear to the Sophists who, by negating any stable viewpoint of things, prevented the certainty of knowledge and of language and demanded of the law the strongest work of establishing what was true and what was false, what was right and what, on the other hand, was wrong. Plato has the merit of having inaugurated the concept of the rational soul which, by regulating itself on the principle of non-contradiction, fixes the uniqueness of meanings, subtracting them from that oscillation of sense that is the expression of a symbolic language that impedes the development of a structured thought, a discourse constructed upon stable and universal definitions, a language that claims to remove any ambiguity, any risk of misunderstanding and incomprehension. This is why today we still say that Plato is the father of grammar and the founder of metaphysics and Western philosophical thought.

The second premise is that regardless we cannot ignore the historical framework in which his thought is shaped. We are talking about the profound poly-cultural crisis that affected the years of his youth. The defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian war, the nefarious experience of the aristocratic experiment of the Thirty Tyrants, the return to a democracy that soon turns out to be a disappointment so strong that it is soiled with Socrates' blood. A socio-political decay but not only, for Plato the crisis also concerns man understood in his totality: in his cultural aspects, in his values, in his being a citizen. Having acquired this appalling awareness, the Athenian philosopher will direct every effort in an attempt to trigger a profound ethical renewal of man in the name of virtue, justice and the common good, in short, what he proposes will be a global reform of human existence.

Platonism, therefore, has an all-encompassing claim. Plato does not try to give an answer to single questions, to single fields of life and knowledge, as did all the philosophers who preceded him. There is no branch of knowledge that is not considered in his philosophy. Plato is interested both in philosophical questions and in those that are religious, ethical, political, linguistic and artistic. His philosophy develops theories in every area, in the field of knowledge, in that of ethics, politics, art, the cosmos, etc. Despite this, politics remains the main objective, the greatest need of his philosophy. The search for the collective good is the object of all his efforts. For Plato, injustices will never end until philosophers lead the State. This is the fulcrum of his political theories. For this criteria any other form of government, tyranny, timocracy and also democracy were revealed, to his eyes, as being totally inadequate for the foundation of the just State.

A new man for a new politics, a new politics for a new man. This could be his slogan as well as the objective of his philosophy. For this Plato, throughout his life, will place his genius at the service of the community. His greatest masterpiece, the dialogue of the Republic, became the first work of antiquity to create a project of an ideal, utopian state. But despite his laudable intentions, he will never meet anyone who is willing to test his theories of the State and the decline of the Greek poleis [cities] will prove dramatically unstoppable.

2. LIFE

In his Chronology, Apollodorus of Athens set the date of Plato's birth at the eighty-eighth Olympiad, on the seventh day of the month of Targellion, i.e. at the end of May 428 BCE.

Plato was born in Athens to aristocratic parents: his father Aristone imposed the name of his grandfather Aristocles on him (although according to Diogenes Laërtius himself there is a legend according to which the philosopher was actually the son of the god Apollo). It was his gymnastics teacher who jokingly named him Plato, given the breadth of his shoulders, (from the Greek πλατύς, platýs, which means wide or broad). In fact, Plato practiced pancrazio a sort of combined combat and boxing. According to others, however, the name was attributed to his broad forehead.

From an early age, Plato was able to distinguish himself for his acute intellect and prodigious memory. His upbringing, at least initially, was mostly artistic. He studied music, painting and literature, distinguishing himself, in particular, in poetic and dramatic composition. Already in the period of his youth he came into contact with philosophy, as demonstrated by the fact that he had Cratylus among his teachers (himself a