/lit/ - Literature

>>13802017
If The Republic doesn't count, then probably Phaedrus. Symposium is just drunk gay dudes barely forming coherent thoughts. I hate the tone of it, and it doesn't suit the subject matter very well. Phaedrus has a much more flowing and carefree feeling to it, which actually suits the subject matter, and the discussion is much more interesting. Symposium is the most overrated dialogue.

Parmenides is the only one that contains any truth.

>>13802017
Parmenides, it feels like tables are turned.
In later on the dialogue Socrates become a sophist in others like Menon. "That doesn't make sense at all!" "I just explained my theory! All is one!" "b... but that contradict the common sense!"

>>13802035
What a meaningless analysis. Your hierarchy is fully based on the tone of those dialogues, ffs
>>13802212
Good luck understanding it without Sophist

>>13802296
Think it through more carefully. When , in Platonic dialogues, people take certain premises as granted, try to think about what the contrary claim would lead to.
These texts were meant to be read by serious scholars: with those passages Plato wasn't trying to trick them by just saying that what he was saying was true. Again, think it through and stop being so dense (not everyone is as stupid as you might think)

>>13802312
What... are you trying to say except "read more carefully"?

>>13802296
Don't you mean Aristoteles, the future tyrant who acts as Parmenides' interlocutor for the entire second half of the dialogue? And isn't the point of the entire second half explicitly an exercise in how to work out hypotheses which just arbitrarily uses Parmenides' own hypothesis as an example?

Parmenides because I love the sheer autism of the thing. Close second might be Timaeus because of the beautiful cosmological constructions.

>>13802393
Obviously not. Read it again and actually think this time.

>>13802017
The one with you and me

how do i understand parmenides?

>>13802393
What? Parmenides is more close to Plato than Aristotle.

the Timaeus is pretty dope, currently studying it in grad school.

just finished reading the first four of Plato's collected works and those we extra comfy, esp Phaedrus

>>13802331
He's trying to say that there is a broad archetypal scheme to the Platonic dialogues that most gloss over.

The general construction of the dialogue itself can be a metaphor in many ways. And the metaphor for the physical things described can be lost on people even.

Plato's Republic is very similar to Hobbes' Leviathan in a key way. You have to connect the dots. :3

>Phaedrus.
It's meta, the myth of Charioteer is his best, it completements Republic, it's not meandering like other Dialogues (Cratylus bring the most tortuous).

>>13803158
Cratylus is the best dialogue alongside parmenides and timaeus

>>13803162
Doesn't mean it isn't excessive, the conclusion foreseeing Wittgenstein by 2500 years is obviously astonishing—and it's a good starting point to proceed after having read the "early" and "Socratic" dialogues.

>>13802976

>>13802965
there's a person called aristotle in parmenides, unrelated to the famous philosopher

>>13802965
Well, >>13803312 already came in for the save, but it's astounding that someone would miss that there's a character named Aristoteles in the dialogue.

>>13802783
I'm pretty sure it's obvious, given how totally explicit Parmenides is on those points.

>>13803177
What conclusion do you see the Cratylus sharing with WIttgenstein?

>>13803212
It sucks, but if you're going "why the fuck does everyone agree with Socrates???????" everytime you read a platonic dialogue, you can rest assured that you've misinterpreted it. Btw there's no reaction as plebbish as that one, that's literally how every retarded high schooler reacted when they first read Plato. You should really treat it as a red flag

>>13804758
Why do you need another man to give you the correct interpretation?

What's your take of Parmenides, anon?

>>13803312
>>13803985
The supposition that Aristotle in Parmenides is completely unrelated to the Aristotle who was (probably, but hard to date) a current student of Plato at the Academy at the time the dialogue was written, in a dialogue which brings up the third-man objection which Aristotle himself takes credit for just seems to me to be a brainlet take.

Like, I know the events depicted are long before Aristotle was born, but don't you think that Plato, who is always so careful about the names of his characters, just MIIIGHT have been nodding to his student who is clearly a genius? Why are people so quickly to assume that "Aristotle" in Plato's dialogue, has absolutely no relation to "Aristotle" his current student? And why do people the possibility that Aristotle, who was Plato's student and friend for twenty years MIIGHT have had some influence back upon his teacher? I can understand if you want to fiddle with the dates in order to say that Parmenides is not that late of a dialogue, but it seems a brainlet opinion to me.

>>13802017
Apology and Phaedro because of Socrates, The Republic, phaedrus and politician for dialectic. Timaeus and Critias because i'm autistic and i believe Atlantis exist.

>>13805285
>Like, I know the events depicted are long before Aristotle was born, but don't you think that Plato, who is always so careful about the names of his characters, just MIIIGHT have been nodding to his student who is clearly a genius?
No, because there's no good basis for doing so. Literally all the significance would be is "oh, Aristotle's name is in the dialogue, also the third man argument appears twice", and that's it. And with that,, you don't even actually get a relation *in the dialogue* between the character Aristoteles and the third man argument.

Whereas, if you bother to pay attention to the dialogue itself, the narrator Cephalus explicitly draws our attention to the fact that the Aristoteles present was the one who later became part of the Thirty, i.e., The Thirty Tyrants. That's significant, and one can wonder whether the second half also acts as a dramatic example of what's discussed in the Republic as the danger of teaching dialectic to the young.

It seems pretty brainlet to put so much weight on it being a reference to the later philosopher, who only briefly mentions the third man argument by name in the Metaphysics and then doesn't spell it out.

>>13802035
>Symposium is just drunk gay dudes
I only now can understand what kind of plebs are the foreigners

>>13802017
In terms of subjective enjoyment of the more frivolous kind Lysis, because it’s cute. The shota dialogue.

The Gorgias hasn’t been mentioned yet. The unapologetic violence, radicalism and flamboyance of Callicles’ philosophy is unique among the cast of Plato’s dialogues. Whereas most other interlocutors of Socrates are undone by their adherence to propriety, their unwillingness to contradict moral and social conventions, the uncompromising Callicles is defeated by his very own intellectual extremism (and yet, politically and socially, Callicles is an establishment figure—a sign of the moral state of Athens). Probably one of the most compelling Platonic “villains,” even if his impressive rhetoric disintegrates pathetically under the elenchus due to his poor arguments.

>>13802017
Parmenides is his masterpiece in terms of philosophical rigour and thus probably my favourite. Ion is probably among his most entertaining dialogues. Phaedo is perhaps the most moving dialogue, in its depiction of Socrates as he approaches death.

But really, the Republic is easily his greatest work. It essentially defines Philosophy as a subject, framing all the debates.

the alpha Diogenes
the beta Plato

>>13805493
way to ruin this exchange with a comic

>>13805538
>m-muh shadow world
fuck off, Plato

>>13805364
Imagine you are a professor at a university, and you had a student named Arthur who is a foreigner but clearly a genius. And then you wrote a work critiquing your theory (which you are teaching Arthur), and in this work you have a character named Arthur who is the interlocutor for a good twenty pages. Do you think it is at all plausible that there is no link whatsoever between the Arthur you interact with on an everyday basis, who you know is going to read this work, and the Arthur who you present as filling the role of your former teacher? Have a little thought.

>>13805552
what even is this response?
he made diogenes look like a fucking retarded heckler but with a witty comeback

>>13805558
yep, sounds like headcanon

>>13805559
it's not the full comic

>>13805559
>>13805576

>>13805576
>>13805583
this makes it worse, not better

>>13805609
t. got bullied in gymnasion by alpha Cynics

>>13805617
i am literally on diogenes' side you illiterate mong

>>13805493
>>13805576
>>13805583
moronic even for comic morons

>>13805558
Well, because it's not properly analogous? We don't know especially much about what Aristotle was up to at the Academy, let alone his closeness to Plato or Speusippus. That they probably new each other well is clear, but that's it. You'd have to be able to account for whether Plato treats of any other criticisms by other members of the Academy as well, because if it's a one-off, it's not a great defense of it as plausible. Further, you have to address what the dramatic purpose is of including a historical figure such as the member of the Thirty Tyrants as being among the interlocutors, and it's not sufficiently clear from the dialogue that it's a facile criticism of the sort of "kek im calling you a tyrant bro lol".

Further, you'd have to be clear about the priority of the Parmenides to the Metaphysics and vice versa to see who's coming up with the Third Man argument. But even then, if the divisions of Plato's dialogues into Early, Middle, Late based on stylometry holds even a little, it's clear that Parmenides comes before Timaeus, a dialogue that explicitly contains the paradigmatic account of Forms that is refuted in the second occurrence of the Third Man argument, and that's something that would need to be addressed. One assumption that I think the Parmenides ought refute is that Plato couldn't or didn't think of such criticisms or have them in mind when writing his earlier dialogues, and you'd have to explain why he never bothered to edit it them further later on. This only makes sense if the predominant scholarly accounts of the Forms are wrong, and that there's no one theory ever presented, nor did he ever intend to present one, but rather dialogical occasions that need to be treated with greater carefulness.

But here, let's grant your hypothesis that Aristotle *is* a reference to the famed student; what does the reference actually mean, and why should we take it that the Third Man argument is the proof, when that argument is put into the mouth of *Parmenides* and not Aristotle? All you end up with is a reference in name, with a character who just seems a bit baffled by Parmenides for the second half. How would that, as a reference, even work then?

Like, it's a neat thought, but that's it, and its basis rest upon very questionable assumptions that we have no other evidence for. There are some scholars who wonder whether the Sophist and Statesmen are actually Aristotle's lost dialogues, and while the thought is neat, it's not defensible.

>>13802017
Hard to pick one favorite, but I'll say that Protagoras and Cratylus are both underrated and hilarious. Socrates pulls this great move on Protagoras where he complains that he has trouble following big speeches, and could Protagoras please speak more concisely? After a big argument that gets a lot of the other Greek sophists and guests involved supporting Socrates, he makes a huge rambling speech in response interpreting a poem, and gets Prodicus to defend his points with nitpicking over words, which gets Protagoras sputtering in astonishment.

Cratlyus starts with two great jokes, the character Hermogenes complaining to Socrates that Cratylus claims that every name refers to the the named thing or person's nature, except for Hermogenes's own name, apparently. Socrates responds, "Not to worry! This is perfect, actually, see, Prodicus offers two classes on language and the meanings on names, an expensive one that goes into every detail, and a cheap one. Problem is I could only afford the cheap one. Eh fuck it, let's get started." He then hooks Hermogenes along with a bunch of bullshit etymologies where every etymology gets reduced to "motion", except for a handful of words, including the word for fire, Heraclitus's principle, where he goes, "eh, probably just a barbarian word, moving on". It's great, Socrates keeps dropping hints about how suspect his own accounts are, and Hermogenes gets more and more excited, to Socrates's bafflement.

>>13805446
I forget the Gorgias sometimes, but that whole Callicles fight is incredible.

>>13805446
I love the dialogue with Callicles. It's among my favorites of anything Plato wrote.