/lit/ - Literature

>>14616399
It’s not a bad structure. Starting with apology is always good. Though I don’t know if Plato has such a radical change in style or ideas over his writings that I think it is strictly necissary.

>>14616399
>reading Plato
cringe, read one of these big brained empiricists instead of your pie-in-the-sky retard philosopher

>>14616411
Bait better baitboi

>>14616399
Any chronology is speculative. Plato didn't date his dialogues.

>>14616422
>ANYONE WHO INSULTS MUH PLAYDOUGH MUST BE BAIT
Cope harder. No one with any serious scientific background takes Plato or his theories seriously.

>>14616432
I was aware of this - but stylistic peculiarities seem evident on a macro-scale (to scholars at least).

I've been reading in the order they come in in the complete works. It's roughly the same, but The Republic is all together later and Phadeo is in the beginning.

>>14616446
>No one with any serious scientific background takes Plato or his theories seriously
yeah because they're retards who took an intro to philosophy class at universities which are specifically designed to make you stupid

bump

>>14616411
t. Aristophanes

>>14616399
read mendeleev's dream. Old thinkers were given relevance because they had a useful understanding of chemistry or physics. Philosophy

>>14617376
Wrong thread?

bump

Plato's explanation of why the deepest truths cannot be expressed in written form is famously abstruse. Before one attains the "thing which is cognizable and true" (gnōston te kai alēthes), one must have apprehended the "name," "account" (logos), "image," and "knowledge" (epistēmē). Name and account are approached through verbal description, while sense perception perceives the image. One attains knowledge only from the combination of verbal description and sense perception, and one must have knowledge before one can attain the object of knowledge (which Plato calls simply "the Fifth," name, account, image, and knowledge being "the Four"). The Fifth, moreover, differs from what is sensible and verbal expressions of it. Name and account provide the "quality" of a thing (to poion), but not its "essence" or "being" (to on). They are, moreover, akin to sense perceptions in that they are ever shifting and relative, not fixed. As a result, the student who attempts to understand the Fifth through name, account, image, and knowledge is confused; he seeks the essence, but always finds the quality intruding. Only certain kinds of student can scrutinize the Four, and even then the vision of the Fifth comes by a sudden flash.

Since this is how philosophy is conducted, no serious person would ever attempt to teach serious philosophic doctrines in a book or to the public at large. Dionysius' motivation for having written a philosophic text must have been a desire for glory. Indeed, he had received only one lecture on metaphysics from Plato.