Ancient Philosophy · Part 12 · Athens · B2
Plato I: The Socratic Dialogues
Part 12 of Ancient Philosophy: after Socrates’s death, his pupil Plato wrote dozens of dialogues in which Socrates questions people about piety, courage, justice and virtue. Every one of them survives. In the early dialogues, the questions usually end without an answer, and that is the point. Defining with relative clauses (piety is what…, a brave person is someone who…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Your teacher across four hundred years. And the only Greek philosopher whose works all survive.
Every dialogue we know he wrote, and a few he probably didn’t. Tonight, the early ones, where Socrates asks “What is it?” and nobody can answer.
Plato was born into a rich Athenian family around 428 BCE. As a young man he followed Socrates, and after his teacher’s execution in 399 BCE he left Athens and travelled, to Megara, perhaps to Egypt, and to Sicily, where he tried and failed to influence the rulers of Syracuse.
Around 387 BCE he founded the Academy, a school in a grove outside Athens, which lasted, in one form or another, for centuries. He wrote about thirty-five dialogues and some letters; scholars still argue which of the letters are genuine.
Plato never speaks in his own voice. His dialogues are conversations, usually led by Socrates. In the early dialogues, Socrates asks someone to define a virtue, tests each definition, and shows that it fails. The dialogue often ends in aporia, puzzlement: nobody knows the answer, but everybody knows they do not know.
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