/lit/ - Literature

The Republic contains over a hundred references to “god” or “gods”.

The Republic contains over a hundred references to “god” or “gods,”

An ancient reports tells how the night before Socrates met Plato, he had a dream in which a baby swan fly up into his lap. Then it turned into an adult and flew into the sky, singing an enchanting tune. Meeting Plato the next day, he recalled the dream and said that the swan was Plato. Now when Plato was dying, he had dream, in which he was a swan jumping from tree to tree, and no one could catch him. It is then said that Simmias, a follower of Socrates and then Plato, interpreted the dream as saying that everyone would try to fully grasp Plato's thought, but that none would every really fully capture it.

It's been downhill since Plato.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis

Also

Read the Republic if you haven't already.
Plato's celebrated cave has had a tremendous impact on the history of ideas.

>Schopenhauer fell under the spell of Professor Schulze who advised Schopenhauer to restrict his reading strictly to Kant and Plato. Schopenhauer happily obliged and would later cite these two philosophers, almost exclusively, as providing the foundation for his own philosophical thought. He also was introduced to eastern philosophy through some recent European translations of the Upanishads.

Interesting

Plato's Dialogues

Fiction, or Non-Fiction?

>Plato received frequent unflattering attention in contemporary comedy. Seventeen passages have been preserved in which Plato and his school are the target. Aristophon wrote an entire comedy entitled 'Plato",

>In Book Eight of Plato's Laws, the Athenian speaker considers how to have legislation banning masturbation. He then states that this law is according to nature.

Clement(writing c. ad 200) reports that Platonists used to write entire books to show that the Stoics and Aristotle had stolen their doctrines from Plato.

>"Every idea is a god" -Plato
>Parmenides 134c

The divine Plato son of Apollo

>My name is Plato and I invented the courtroom drama.

“Where he went, we cannot for certain say,” Durant writes. “Twelve years he wandered, imbibing wisdom from every source, sitting at every shrine, tasting every creed. Some would have it that he went to Judea and was moulded there for a while by the tradition of the almost socialistic prophets; and even that he found his way to the banks of the Ganges and learned the mystic meditation of the Hindus. We do not know.”