/lit/ - Literature

>>19577788
After Gorgias and Protagoras yes

>>19577791
which ones

>>19578266

>>19578281
oh they are from plato

>>19577791
why?

>>19578389
Gorgias introduces you to Plato's justification of objective truth/justice. These found everything else he will develop.
Protagoras shows you his rhetoric (the socratic dialogue) which necessitates objective truth to work. In this dialogue both speakers are initially, by their later standard, wrong and they switch sides. Did our hero, Socrates, lose? No he didn't because it doesn't matter if you're wrong in socratic dialogue. What matters is that truth will come out and you will both grow and develop. Now the other interlocutors don't understand this rhetoric and treat rhetoric in an aristotelian manner (where the one who looks correct wins even if they're false) and they lose this style. Just pay attention to how Socrates speaks.
Now his rhetoric development is very important as Aristotle believes in objective truth too (but from individual substance fundamentally) so this differentiates them where truth is fundamental or up high for Plato and you'll see this in his world of forms later.

Republic is middle Plato where Plato becomes confident and theorizes more so the rhetoric that we're used to becomes a bit more of a handmaiden (which is fine for Plato because for him a book is an image of a conversation so it should fundamentally be an activating aspect).

Is it ok to start with plato with the “death of socrates” penguin classic book that combines 4 things of his or should i start with Gorgias or a topic that interests me like Ion

>>19578886
You can start anywhere in the early dialogues but I think you'll get the best metaphysical introduction going gorgias > protagoras > republic.
A better biography on Socrates you'd want to start w euthyphro etc or perhaps there are better ways to develop a good biography on him.

>>19578886
>>19578893
By this you should choose the topic that interests you but if you're reading Plato to read Plato you'd definitionally be looking for the metaphysical introduction to him.

>>19578886
I prefer the Hackett 5 Dialogues version, not that it matters much
You can also start anywhere

>>19578886
Symposium is fun too

>>19578886
Ion is the most boring confusing dialogue ever, so expect weird

The Trial and Death book is pretty good because it's Euthyphro (classic dilemma/paradox), Crito (classic legal philosophy problem), and Phaedo (good introduction to bits of Plato's/Socrates' mysticism), all earlyish-middle dialogues too which is ideal before jumping into more hardcore metaphysical stuff (middle-late and especially late dialogues). Throw Meno in there too before the Republic, Symposium and Phaedrus would be good ideas too before the Republic. And I agree with the other anon about Gorgias and Protagoras being nice early-middle dialogues to read early on too, before the Republic.

If you want to be a purist try to read at least a couple more early dialogues like Charmides, Laches, and the Hippiases, and you're basically reading Plato chronologically at that point, since you can then go directly --> Republic --> late big time famous metaphysical dialogues.

>>19577788
I think so, but you might not OP. What are you looking for in reading the Republic?

>>19578961
Why is Ion boring and confusing?

>>19579013
Admittedly I'm reporting my own experience, I've never gone back and reread it and I remember looking it up one time and seeing that it's generally considered enigmatic (no one can tell exactly whether it's a satire, and if so what the joke precisely is, or if it's something else entirely). Maybe I'm being unfair or inflating it in my memory though.

>>19577788
Is not about the State, is about the soul

>>19577788
Absolutely, but you need to read only these three books before (of plato):

1. Socrate's Apology
2. Gorgias
3. Protegoras

now you know alittle bit about justice, then proceed to the republic

if you read it and are still hungry try The Laws

It includes a friendly reminder that butt fucking handsome young boys is the sweetest human pleasure.

>>19577788
I don't know what these guys are thinking. Purely as /lit/erature the republic is one of if not his best works and you don't need any prep to get it. As far as the philosophy goes, I'm not really a plato bro, but most of the necessary information for understanding him is already present, It was his first dialog I read and I was just fine.

>>19579219
Well yeah because Plato writes in dialogues and you learn more about it over time because it's timeless but you can skip a lot of questions which will present themselves if you read it in a certain order and that way you'll get a lot more out of it. But yeah you can in some sense read anywhere more so than almost any other philosopher

>>19579247
My point is that the bulk of plato's value comes from his literary achievements. I feel like he might have seen it that way too. I've seen a lot of people try to read a complete or coherent philosophy out of the dialogues, you have to stretch and guess based on what his students were teaching after his death.

Republic is a deeply enjoyable work of fiction and that's the reason people today should be reading his dialogues in general. If you want to hear plato's philosophy, there's a lot of people that do it better; he was barely trying.

>>19579289
This is just silly. Fine as an idiosyncratic personal theory but not if you're presenting it as a normalish interpretation of Plato. Just look at Lloyd Gerson's work. Most scholars have drawn a reasonably coherent metaphysics from Plato, with only a minority of idiosyncratic readers claiming he writes disconnected "aporetic" dialogues and has no overarching viewpoint (this is sometimes claimed for Socrates but probably isn't even true of him). Plato's immediate successors at the Academy actually changed his philosophy a fair bit by attenuating the mystical and mystery/"orphic" aspects and reducing it to rationalist Pythagoreanism, or in the case of the Peripatetics focusing on the Academy's logico-empirical classificatory efforts to do natural philosophy.

But they still had platonic assumptions, since Plato completely changed the landscape of Greek philosophy with his logical and metaphysical idealism. Even people who denied his metaphysical idealism were changed forever by his logical idealism. Read any of the early dialogues and you'll see how the sophists argued using "topoi" and mythological improvisation.

>>19577788
You need to find the most technically accurate translation possible, otherwise it's a terrible game of telephone. Basically I'm talking a translation that makes it sound in English like a Plato is speaking like a Hindu guru who never learned English correctly.

>>19579324
To be clear, I'm not saying there isn't a coherent platonism, I'm saying it takes a huge amount of work and outside info to get there. Learning plato from plato isn't a reasonable option, least of all for this guy who probably just wants to read a book he heard about.

>But they still had platonic assumptions
They did, but that doesn't mean you need to read him for those assumptions. There's plenty of stoic work that's leagues ahead of even aristotle in explaining the logic of the day.

I agree that there are ideological continuities through the dialogues and that there is an order to read them if you're trying to understand plato's philosophy, but I don't see that philosophy as something that everyone could or should understand nor as something OP is reading plato for.

>>19577788
Plato is just an extension of certain schools of Hindustani philosophy: discuss!

>>19579420
XENOPHON IS A FAG
PLUTARCH IS A NIGGER

>>19579403
How is it not an option? Most of the information we have on Plato is from Plato's own writings, most of which have survived, which is incredibly, almost unimaginably rare when it comes to ancient Greek thinkers. Aristotle's writings languished in some trunk in a moldy cellar for a few centuries and then when they were finally purchased and moved to Italy over a third were lost. Almost all of the most famous Aristotelian writings in antiquity, particularly his early dialogues, are now lost. Plato survives almost intact, plus plenty of pseudo-platonic works possibly by members of his school while he was alive.

The other major source on Plato is Aristotle, for instance for the famous "unwritten doctrines" he mentions and certain facts about the factions of interpretation at Plato's school (around Speusippus and Xenocrates).

When Plato's works were finally made available in full in the Renaissance, they immediately started a cultural revolution as Cosimo and Lorenzo di Medici tried to found a new Platonic Academy with the help of Pletho and Ficino. That's the kind of influence access to the platonic corpus could have, within 10-20 years. It's conventionally thought that the revival of neoplatonism decisively influenced Copernicus (this is a bit iffy), but it definitely massively influenced Kepler. In antiquity Plato was also incredibly influential on the formation of Second Temple Judaism and Christianity, through Philo and others. All that comes from the platonic dialogues. Emerson said Plato's dialogues are one of the few works one could read by a stream in paradise for 10,000 years (or something to that effect).

Honestly, the fact alone that Plato survives almost completely extant is incredible enough to warrant reading him. How much of Epicurus survives? A few letters in Diogenes? Or Democritus, or Anaxagoras, both major school founders, of whom we have a handful of fragments only.

>They did, but that doesn't mean you need to read him for those assumptions.
Why not? You absolutely need to read him to understand Aristotle. Stoic logic is different from peripatetic logic, and both are founded on Plato's logical idealism, and with the wedding of that idealism with the geometric method thanks to Plato's mathematical leanings that Plato encouraged at the Academy.

It's like saying you want to understand late medieval philosophy, but not medieval Aristotelianism. Or saying you want to understand early modern philosophy, but not Descartes. There are certain figures who are milestones and landmarks you can't avoid even if you don't like them. You can't understand Spinoza without Descartes, and you can't understand Leibniz without understanding his deep anxiety about Spinozism as a natural conclusion of Cartesianism.

>>19579477
Not the anon you're responding to, and I tend in my reading toward much of what you say, but isn't it plausible to want to read the Republic because one wonders simply about politics and justice and how they alone were thought of by an important thinker? In that case, would it be useful to say one needs to read something like Phaedo, or the less discussed Statesman and Laws?

>>19579570
Msybe even more to the point, isn't it more dialectical in the spirit of Plato and his Socrates to let a potential reader take him a little or a lot as needed?

>>19579570
>>19579575
I agree for the most part but I think the way the Republic is taught as a standalone text is a slightly unique case of bad judgement, first because it's notoriously hard to tell how serious Plato is being, and second because reading Plato is fucking difficult for most beginner students these days and most students I've seen reading the Republic end up coming away from it with only vague ideas. Even worse, the Republic is often overly focused on by idiosyncratic or even dishonest interpreters like Straussians, so what you're really reading is the Straussian appropriation of the Republic.

Whereas if you read something like Charmides or Gorgias you will instantly have an example of elenchus and Socrates'/Plato's attitude toward eristic/sophistic reasoning, and if you read something like the Phaedrus you will instantly have an idea of Plato's mystical/metaphysical idealist side, and all of these combined are still shorter than the Republic. Also reading the Trial and Death of Socrates "cycle" that usually gets packaged is a good introduction to the method of elenchus and its archetypally "platonic" presuppositions (we should define concepts our well; there are unitary ideals immanent in the apparent multiplicity of the particulars; what does this tell us about the structure of reality, if anything?), again all in a package shorter than the Republic.

But a lot of this is coming from a position of assuming that people are going to want to read all of Plato, not just get a glimpse of it. I guess that's not everyone's position, although it physically hurts me to say "PERHAPS NOT EVERYONE SHOULD READ ALL OF PLATO."

If you have a good teacher or you are a more capable and patient reader than most beginner students I've personally witnessed, or if you just want to read the Republic so bad that you have infinite motivation, then you should ignore all rules/advice and just do whatever. Better a motivated but messy start than a bunch of autistically perfect plans that go nowhere.

>>19579477
Aristotle talks about plato only to attack him, if you want to talk about the famous metaphysical idealism we've been received today, there's incredibly little texual evidence in plato. All we have is a mention at the end of one of the early dialogues, I forget which, and his reverence for pythagoras. Other than that, he says nothing that can't be interpreted otherwise.

Philologically, yes, our understanding of Aristotle is dire. We lost all of his exoteric works, and (probably) some esoteric works even after that trunk got dug up. However, what we do have is dense and explicit. From plato, we have fictional works with philosophical discussion generated not primarily to transmit ideas, but to make for pleasurable reading.

>How much of Epicurus survives?
We've got some fragments as well, and there's that rock he apparently is quoted in. Let me say, I wasn't really paying attention to him for a long time, but atomism is fucking based. Metaphysical idealism comes up as nearly necessary without atomism in my view.

>Why not? You absolutely need to read him to understand Aristotle.
I don't think that's a fair statement, but you're missing my point. I'm not trying to say here that platonism is useless, I'm saying that the dialogues can be appreciated without that context and they aren't very good at teaching it. The dialogues are compatible with platonism at best. I personally don't think plato was a platonist, but that's beside the point.


The reason plato's writings outlived so many contemporary ones despite the fact that their ideas survived is actually a good point to bring up. Plato's writings had an appeal outside of their content. Some of that is his being the standard for attic greek, but most of his survival should be attributed to his literary excellence.

In short, the argument that platonism matters is wholly separate from the argument that plato's dialogues matter.

>>19579610
>But a lot of this is coming from a position of assuming that people are going to want to read all of Plato, not just get a glimpse of it. I guess that's not everyone's position, although it physically hurts me to say "PERHAPS NOT EVERYONE SHOULD READ ALL OF PLATO."
Lol I get that, it's a pretty hard temptation as someone who wants to take Plato seriously to take the part of him seriously that seems to know when to let a Meno or Euthypho be responsible for doing their own thing. If you take the Phaedrus seriously, you have to know something like 99 kinds of souls to effectively reach everyone!

>>19577788
>virtue is... LE GOOD