/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.15417755]

Hello, /lit/.
I am a bit despondent right now, I must say, after just having read The Last Days of Socrates. I went into it with all of these preconceived notions about the excellence of Plato as a philosopher – ‘The founder of philosophy’, ‘the father of thought’, ‘the one to whom the rest of philosophy is a mere footnote’ -- and I was hoping that by reading him I would not only be enlightened but would be well-launched on my journey into Western philosophy and literature. But what I encountered was far from impressive. He makes so many horrific arguments, with so many fallacies, that I was honestly struck by how disparate was the reputation of Plato vs the reality of Plato.

First of all, the first three dialogues -- Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito -- have nothing interesting to say, philosophically speaking. Euthyphro is a dialogue between Socrates and a stupid man who could not understand the question ‘Is something pious because it is loved by the gods or is it loved by the gods because it is pious?’ No conclusions were reached about the nature of piety or its epistemology. Same with the others. Now, I wasn't too worried about this. I had heard that the first three dialogues are more of an introduction to the character and history of Socrates as a philosophical/literary icon and that Phaedo is where the meat really starts.

So today I opened Phaedo and began reading through it. I got to the part where Socrates explains how death is agreeable to a philosopher because it entails a separation from the body. It seemed to be going well and I was genuinely excited for the first time while reading Plato. Then this happened:
>SOCRATES: If something smaller comes to be, it will come from something larger; something weaker from something stronger; swifter from slower; worse from better; juster from the more unjust.
>CEBES: Of course.
>SOCRATES: So we have sufficiently established that all things come to be in this way, opposites from opposites.
This was the first major blow. Socrates fallaciously argues that, because all things which become [insert comparative adjective] must necessarily come from a state where they possess [its opposite/antonym] to a greater degree, all things must come from their opposites. Of course something that BECAME lightER must have come from a state in which it was darkER, but this does not prove that something light necessarily comes from something dark, that something small necessarily comes from something big, that something just necessarily comes from something unjust, etc. This is so obvious yet Socrates can't see it.
Ok, I thought, its just a hiccup. Ill read on.
>SOCRATES: What comes to be from being alive?
>CEBES: Being dead.
>And what comes to be from being dead?
>One must agree that it is being alive.
>Then, Cebes, living creatures and things come to be from the dead?
>So it appears.
>Then our souls exist in the underworld.
It was at this point I dropped it.

[OP No.15417757]

Tell me, lit, will his other dialogues be better or is it all like this? Plato is so overrated I am honestly scared that other, similarly reputable philosophers will also be trash. Reading Plato has made me doubt the judgement of everyone who praised him, and for that reason given me less confidence in the value of other philosophers, also praised by the same people.

[Anonymous No.15417796]

>>15417757
He didn't invent logic and was partially against it. His rationalism was idealist

[Anonymous No.15417811]

>>15417757
Just read secondaries and then you can pull apart what he was actually saying. Those are dialogues and sometimes he contradicts himself on purpose. Socrates was pretty poignant about philosophy being an activity not a tract

[Anonymous No.15417812]

>>15417755
Correct. Philosophy is a huge waste of time.

[Anonymous No.15417845]

>First of all, the first three dialogues -- Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito -- have nothing interesting to say, philosophically speaking.
You read a compilation aimed at general readers, with the assumption that general readers will have an easier time getting into Plato if they have the dramatic and "biographically significant" dialogues of Plato, namely the ones where he is being condemned to die. They are early or early-middle dialogues and contain mostly hints at Plato's more developed views.

>No conclusions were reached
That's the point of Plato's method. He is showing the insufficiency of easy, common answers, and teaching people to inquire after the actual truth. If the actual truth is not found, you haven't found it. This was contrary to the tendency of the sophists who dominated Athenian discourse in the fifth century. It's historically significant because Plato arguably invented the logic of essences, or idealism, by doing this, and arguably moved philosophy out of its mythopoeic mode and into explicitly epistemological discourse as first philosophy, while laying out all the classic problems of epistemology in the process.

The piety problem is one of those classic questions and is still talked about today. Plato also lays out possibly the first rigorous examination of the relationship between law and deontology, or law as socially constructed vs. moral law, again because he is concerned with the essential and true content underlying any concrete manifestation or discursive formation we have access to.

The exact nature of Socrates' earlier arguments in the Phaedo has always been very contentious, with some suggesting that he's being playful or doing "thought experiments" based on arguments traditional at the time. Throughout the dialogues Plato is sort of trying to inherit a century and a half of pre-systematic Greek philosophy and make sense of it all, to put it on a foundation where it can be systematically assessed and unified rather than bandied about haphazardly which was the convention of the sophists. So he may have been doing that. The Phaedo is also opaque because Plato may have been playing with the boundary between exoteric and esoteric, with his own thoughts about reincarnation, which were probably mystical. Remember he's also comforting two young men who are themselves anxious about death while he's about to die and practically indifferent to it.

[Anonymous No.15417862]

>>15417755
You are too coddled by living under the atheist west. The Greeks for lack of a better word, were really dumb, and Socrates was the first to point it out. They would see no problem with worshipping God s who contradicted and hated each other. Socrates was the first to call out religious people for their bullshit.

[Anonymous No.15417868]

>>15417755
Anon don't take this personally but:

YOU'RE LITERALLY A RETARD WITHOUT ANY OUNCE OF CREATIVE LIBIDO IF YOU CANNOT APPRECIATE THE GENIUS OF THE LAST DAYS OF SOCRATES.

Maybe try to rethink your own intelligence, and that 1.NO, you are not just a sudden light of genius in the clouds of century's; 2. YES, all of Plato's works and specifically these three The Last Days of Socrates are the works of a genius; And 3. MUTUALLY, you could either be a retard or just youthful and arrogant without a basing in which to understand it.

[Anonymous No.15417870]

>>15417862
>calls out religious people for their bullshit
>claims a daemon told him everything to say

[Anonymous No.15417871]

>>15417757
Also if you already read the Apology, you would know that Socrates was closer to an agnostic. He mentions various forms of afterlife in different dialogues but that is more of a thought exercise to get you to think.

[Anonymous No.15417875]

>>15417868
>ur dumb
great post

[Anonymous No.15417878]

>>15417870
See my other post about the Apology. Also demons aren't anywhere as retarded as ancient Greek polytheism was.

[Anonymous No.15417892]

>namefagged and doesn't reply
Was it all just bait?

[Anonymous No.15417894]

Filtered

[Anonymous No.15417906]

>>15417878
Greek daemons were considered lesser divinities who ferried information between Gods and men, believing in one without the other makes no sense.

[Anonymous No.15417914]

>>15417845
I'm sorry but nothing you said justifies the horrible reasoning I encountered in Phaedo. I already said that I wasn't much worried about the first three dialogues because I read them (charitably) more as an introduction to the character of Socrates than anything else.
The arguments in Phaedo, the ones I posted, were so horrendously bad that I could not carry on reading. I already pushed through the first three dialogues in order to get to what I was told would be the serious stuff in Phaedo only to be met with that. I feel I am being told 'keep reading, keep reading, it gets better' but it never gets better.

[Anonymous No.15417926]

>>15417906
Socrates was a monotheist if he even believed in any God and was still highly critical of the established Greek religion. Either way, his words are to just get you to think and question everything than to be dogmatically excepted and agreed with.

[Anonymous No.15417934]

>>15417926
*accepted

[Anonymous No.15417951]

>>15417862
>Socrates was the first to call out religious people for their bullshit.
Shut the fuck up pewdiepie, this is possibly about as surface level take as you could have completely instructed by a revisionistic urge in the light of modern liberalism. The Greeks believed wholeheartedly in the Gods and their national myth, unlike the Romans. And yet great philosophy and art can only bloom when in touch with a national myth--; To have a national-myth at all! I'm sure you're at least aware of what the passing on of the Mediterranean civilisation from Greece to Rome entails in the spirit of the nation; that is historically.


Now get the fucking stick out of your ass thinking "uggh grug insecure in not liiking sofcates, thefore i hab to find simple dumb gug value in it to not disagree with everione!". It stems from a total innability to imagine a world out of these relativistic times, no belief is thrown out into the world here, it is seen as open air and assumed as much. No heroes in your eyes.

>No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.

- Carlyle.

You never learned how to think from Plato, true philosophy in choosing between ideas. The mountain between death and life, you cannot appreciate this, whether mythological or psychological does it matter in this instance? The state of the world in which Socrates is proposing and the entire MASS spirit in which this moves through? The soul going throughout life and passing into death, to forget his yearning years of all his eternity, only to remember sadly again. There is too much truth in this papers for your numbed brain, out of the pubescent radicalisation into a cool-liberalism. Trained out of you to think un-sensually, to think at all!

[Anonymous No.15417953]

>>15417926
socrates was highly critical of everything, he was a sophist's sophist and nothing written about him should carry any weight.

[Anonymous No.15417958]

>>15417875
Yes.

[Anonymous No.15417960]

>>15417951
"The soul" does not imply Greek polytheism specifically.

[Anonymous No.15417966]

>>15417960
And? Was this an attempt to correct me?

[Anonymous No.15417974]

>>15417953
Then I'll read your essay destroying Socrates when it comes out. Something that no one could do in 2,000 years.
>>15417966
He was not of the same religion/ paganist theology of his time which is what I was getting at.

[Anonymous No.15417986]

>>15417755
>doesn't get trinitarian dialectic

[Anonymous No.15417988]

>>15417974
There's nothing to destroy, socrates has no substance that's why he never wrote anything down. Western philosophy's mistake was taking him seriously and that's why it lead to a dead end.

[Anonymous No.15417997]

>>15417755
OP, I hear you. I think >>15417845 is the best answer you're going to get regarding the first four dialogues. I felt the same way and absolutely fucking HATED the Phaedo when I first read it. However - ajd I cannot stress this enough - KEEP READING. The Symposium is the dialogue where I first truly began to appreciate Plato, and The Republic is the first where I really began to understand him. As much as it sucks, without slogging through those first four, it will be more difficult to appreciate the later dialogues. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that Plato was often very coy and subtle with his language, and would often have Socrates say something that he may or may not have actually believed just to prove a point.

Take the Republic, for example. Normies who haven't read it or were too stupid love to talk about how it's the beginning of political philosophy and Plato's ideal state and a bunch of other bullshit. However, when you actually read it (after having read the necessary dialogues before it to grow accustomed to Plato's style), you see that all of that is incorrect. The Republic is hardly political philosophy. It's a philosophical doctrine in which Plato: creates a hypothetical city that he knows could never exist for the sake of pointing out problems he sees with society; rails against democracy and having stupid people in power because he's bitter about Athens executing Socrates; lays out the idea of the tripartite soul and defines justice and injustice its a context, using the city metaphor to more clearly explain his points; and uses allegories such as that of the cave and that of the line to espouse his metaphysics of the forms.

Without having experienced the cumbersome but necessary job in the earlier and less important dialogues of filtering through Plato's bullshit to see what he's truly getting at, you probably would have missed a lot of that.

Keep your head up, OP. You're doing a good job. Don't let yourself quit because of this and keep ploughing through it. I promise you it will be worth it.

[Anonymous No.15418024]

>>15417997
Thanks mate. I guess I'll keep going. It's good to hear that I'm not the only one who felt this way about it.

[Anonymous No.15418036]

>>15418024
Most people in this thread shit talking you either haven't read Plato or read like five pages of the Republic and put it down. Don't let them get to you, lol.

[Anonymous No.15418042]

>>15417974
>He was not of the same religion/ paganist theology of his time which is what I was getting at.
Maybe, but he still falls within a Grecian religion which is still likely polytheistic.

[Anonymous No.15418085]

>>15417755
Just read the Parmenides

[Anonymous No.15418134]

>>15417755
Plato doesn't want to tell you the answers, he wants you to think. The man either invented, or at least first put to writing, the Socratic method. The most consistent feature of his work is that all proposed solutions to the problems in question are ultimately rejected. In the allegory of the cave, the man who returns to reveal the truth to his former cellmates is mocked and hated - it is not enough to hear the truth, one must reach it himself, step by step. Plato is simply a guide, he won't drag you along if you won't go. Think less about the conclusions, more about the questions (many of which were posited for the first time in recorded history by Plato, and most of which have remained in dispute ever since).

[Anonymous No.15418170]

>>15417988
The nihilists and the egoists are back at sophistry again, I see.

[Anonymous No.15418459]

>>15418170
socrates invented nihilism

[Anonymous No.15418523]

>>15418459
False. Socrates BTFO the nihilists (Gorgias).

[Anonymous No.15418624]

>>15417755
>Euthyphro is a dialogue between Socrates and a stupid man who could not understand the question ‘Is something pious because it is loved by the gods or is it loved by the gods because it is pious?’ No conclusions were reached about the nature of piety or its epistemology.
You were expecting to be told what to believe, and this would be "enlightenment."
>It was at this point I dropped it.
And thus missed one of the greatest passages in western literature and philosophy. You completely missed the point. Maybe philosophy isn't for you. Contrary to many opinions, it's not for everybody. Or at least most people are incapable in its regards. Plato thought as much.
If you really are so inclined, maybe you should try reading the texts again.
But you should disabuse yourself of the modernist mindset which the dialectics of journalists and English teachers inspire. That's the way of simple common sense facts and explanations traded for simple common sense facts and explanations. It's a tide of deadlocked presumptions, very similar to the rhetoric of the sophists. One in which the deeper questions are left unasked or unexplored, with a life that's not truly lived by them. Socrates wanted to cast these things from his friends, above all. And he did so in the greatest way by accepting his execution and drinking the hemlock.

[Anonymous No.15419114]

>>15418523
christianity is actual nihilism, kid

[Anonymous No.15419153]

>>15419114
Nietzsche was just bitter in this respect, you'd have to be an actual retard to believe Christianity is Nihilism and you weren't being dishonest with yourself.

[Anonymous No.15419166]

>>15417755
>This is so obvious yet Socrates can't see it.
Except it isn't obvious because you are wrong.
In order to become lighter, you DO NECESSARILY need to come from something darker. His analogy holds, and you're a dumbass for not seeing this and thinking that you found a flaw that allowed you to discard the whole argument.
Pleb filtered.

[Anonymous No.15419173]

>>15417755
>>SOCRATES: If something smaller comes to be, it will come from something larger; something weaker from something stronger; swifter from slower; worse from better; juster from the more unjust.
>>CEBES: Of course.
>>SOCRATES: So we have sufficiently established that all things come to be in this way, opposites from opposites.
Damn, I unironically never thought about it that way. This leads to new avenues.

[Anonymous No.15419174]

>>15419153
That he was bitter doesn't detract from the truthfulness of what he said.

[Anonymous No.15420213]

>>15417755

[Anonymous No.15420226]

>>15417757
>Plato is so overrated
Did I stumble into r/books?

[Anonymous No.15420230]

>>15417755
He's a fascist anyway.

Start with Nick Land and the Deleuzians.

[Anonymous No.15420245]

>>15418624
He couldn't even answer a simple question.

[Anonymous No.15420246]

>>15417988
>socrates has no substance that's why he never wrote anything down.
Socrates was a firm believer of oral tradition. Why are you speaking of people you don't understand in the slightest?

[Anonymous No.15420293]

>>15420245
>You've completely missed the point

[Anonymous No.15420383]

>>15420246
Yes, that's my point you fucking stupid nigger

[Anonymous No.15420389]

>>15420230
Socrates BTFO the very early proto-Fascists in the Republic. He was anti-democracy certainly but monarchic and anti-Fascist.

[Anonymous No.15420399]

>>15420383
>Your point
What point? You simply criticized him for a preference of media.

[Anonymous No.15420497]

>>15417845
Great summary of the republic. I highly recommend the Allan bloom edition for just this reason, his essay goes into detail about this

[Anonymous No.15420656]

>>15417757
Just read the Republic my guy

[Anonymous No.15420844]

>>15420399
see >>15417988

[Anonymous No.15420859]

Read the Parmenides and then kys OP

[Anonymous No.15420897]

>>15420844
You're an actual Grade A moron. You haven't actually detailed why his refusal to literary pursuits invalidates his ideas.

[Anonymous No.15420900]

Plato is not trying to have a foolproof argument at all, and indeed you're right that many of his dialogues have fallacies. The point is not to construct a foolproof argument. Why do you think they are presented as dialogues and not as a line of reasoning?

[Anonymous No.15421014]

Imagine being this buttblasted by some old dude who talked about the beauty of fucking young boys and has been dead for thousands of years. If Plato was alive today he'd give you a swirly and shove you in a locker bucko

[Anonymous No.15421073]

>>15417755
>No conclusions were reached about the nature of piety or its epistemology.
R slash whoooooooooosh!!

[Anonymous No.15421510]

>>15417755
I'm sorry to say, OP, but you are a midwit. It's the only explanation to why you feel like that. Thousands of geniuses admit Plato is one of the ( if not the) best philosophers of all time and then it comes you saying he's overrated? Yeah, typical midwit bullshit. My advice is to quit philosophy, it's not meant for you.

[Anonymous No.15421626]

>>15420389
>Only the best must breed
Not sure anon.

[Anonymous No.15421720]

>>15417757
It's more about asking questions than finding rational conclusion Socrates in charmides literally misinterpreted charmides words making whole discussion wrong

[Anonymous No.15421736]

>>15417755
Philosophy major who just took a class on the Phaedo, so I'm basically an expert /s

There is one thing you need to know when reading the Phaedo, and it is basically that you should not take anything Socrates says at face-value. Consider for a moment that he KNEW his arguments were bad. He made them intentionally to be bad, and he consistently hints at it in the Phaedo.

Whenever you read Plato you need to be keen on subtler details. Instead of arrogantly supposing you're smarter than Plato, Aristotle, and the other ancients, consider for a moment that they are AWARE of the glaring problems any 20 year old would find in their arguments.

[Anonymous No.15421763]

>>15421736
This is bait

[Anonymous No.15421806]

>>15421763
No it's actually what he did. He was talking with Pythagoreans, first of all, so his arguments are constructed with this in mind -- the soul is entrapped in the body, there is an afterlife, the forms exist, etc.

Plato literally wrote that philosophy should not be written down. He WROTE that. Consider for a moment that he is using the dialogue format to get the reader to think deeply about these issues. Of course most arrogant readers will read the first sentence of the argument, sense bullshit, and skim through the rest. They'll waste hours reading the dialogues this way and won't actually try to piece the dialogues together, work through the issues themselves, and understand them -- that's the whole point of philosophy. It's not a novel, nor is it a proof for the soul's immortality. In fact a careful reader will find proving the soul's immortality was not the intention of the dialogue. Read into the mythology of Theseus and the twice seven he rescued... The Phaedo is rich with mythological analogies and is extremely stimulating.

[Anonymous No.15422005]

>>15417755
Something can't become darker by becoming lighter than it was.
Something can't become larger by shrinking in size.
You can't become happy by getting sadder.
OP is a faggot.

[Anonymous No.15422013]

>>15417755
start with the greeks is a meme. let this be a lesson about trusting the recommendations of a indonesian manga collection forum.

[Anonymous No.15422053]

>>15421510
>Thousands of geniuses admit Plato is one of the ( if not the) best philosophers of all time
because of his historical impact.
have terence tao read through phaedo and ask him if he thinks it contains a lot of valid arguments. he's not going to blindly worship him as you do. It is you who should quit philosophy. You're not ever trying to think for yourself. pseudfaggot.

[Anonymous No.15422057]

I also took the exact same conclusion from reading Plato: the eloquence is right but the arguments are shite. I think Lord Chesterfield said the same thing.

[Anonymous No.15422070]

>>15418624
More unreasonable hero-worship in place of true philosophy. He expected good arguments because the man is so esteemed in public culture.

[Anonymous No.15422104]

>>15422070
i think people in the modern age take for granted how theese things needed to be established sure it looks simple in hindsight but hindsights 2020 they had psychadelics and war in their time its stunning that they came to conclude this whats more they felt no need to dress it in ponce like many modern philosiphers

[Anonymous No.15422169]

>>15421806
it makes a ton of sense often times conflict gives the most knowledge so if you say something that apears to be flase it gives the person you are talking with a way to "attack" thus you get the joyus act of "defending" the incorrect argument while learning about how somebody else would invalidate it or how you would try to validate it

[Anonymous No.15422212]

>>15422005
>>15419166
Yes, idiots, I said in the OP that his reasoning holds true when we are talking about comparative adjectives. LightER, darkER, bettER, swiftER, etc.. But it does not prove, as he tries to claim, that all things come from their opposites. Something light (not lighter) does not necessarily come from something dark, something small (not smaller) does not necessarily come from something big, etc.

[Anonymous No.15422217]

>>15422212
by comparision it would no?
something is only small in comparision to something big it cannot simpily be small something big must exist to compare it to>?

[Anonymous No.15422229]

>>15422217
iv never read any of this that just follows for me imo does that make sense to you? like they do come from opposites because without opposites they could not be defined?

[Anonymous No.15422242]

>>15422229
for instance i have a weight
>well is it heavy or light
compared to what
>hmm interesting lets reduce this notion to its base virtues
indeed surely the lightest something can be is light
>and the heaviest something can be is heavy
and reamain oposite but still the same
thus they are not opposite but the same
>opposites are of eachother
some shit like that right???

[Anonymous No.15422245]

>>15417755
Do yourself a favor OP and read Reading plato , by Thomas Szlezak .Then you can start with the dialogues.

[Anonymous No.15422249]

>>15422217
This is the last time I’m going to explain it.
Socrates’ argument is that all things which become lighter must have come from a state where they possessed darkness to a greater degree. If something became lighter, it must have been darker before. This is obviously true.
The fallacy comes in when Socrates concludes from this, “this is how all things come to be, opposites from opposites”. But that doesn’t follow at all. Something dark (now we are not talking about darkER) does not have to come from something light, something just (not juster) does not have to come from something more unjust, and so on.
But Socrates seems to think that the first argument proves the second. He goes on, based on this reasoning, to conclude that something living must come from something dead, which apparently means “our souls are in the underworld before we are born”.

[Anonymous No.15422256]

>>15422249
read my green text if hes playing a word game like i was in my green text it follows

[Anonymous No.15422264]

>>15422249
i would say to him why must it come from something dead because we are living ? and because in order to live something must die by defonition? therfore to be living we must have been dead?? do u get what im sayiung?

[Anonymous No.15422267]

>>15422249
also underworld could mean many things we are in the overworld ect ect

[Anonymous No.15422290]

>>15422249
not him but I'm confused as to where the fallacy is. if something is small, it could only come from something larger. this larger thing could only come from something larger, etc. same with dark and light. so if we were to "rewind" time, the objects that are now small we see as the largest they have ever been, perhaps even "The Large", or "The Dark". it seems like a logical conclusion of the argument you seem to agree with. the only problem I see is how to determine if light came from dark, or dark from light.

[Anonymous No.15422303]

>>15422290
ye thats why i would ask about the souls thing because im guessing hes saying that now we are alive we must have been dead but whoes to say we are alive so we will be dead id love to know what he would say haha does he say it in the dialouges?

[Anonymous No.15422317]

>>15422290
also surely if something is light now it came from something heavier and if something is small now it came from something larger ect ect light would come from darker and dark would come from lighter whatever point it is at now would tell us that? or am i a brainlet?

[Anonymous No.15422322]

>>15422317
if today is tuseday and its very light then we could say that it came from something darker and if something is very dark we can say it came from something lighter but more than that we couldent say untill we play a word game

[Anonymous No.15422337]

>>15422322
the word game as above would say that ultimately they are oposites of the same and only comparison compared to eachother allows them to be different? it sucks typeing the most everyone gain an opinion already LMAO

[Anonymous No.15422350]

>>15422303
yeah that seems to be what Scripture supports. strange because Hinduism has this same principle, but as a result they view everything as in decline from the highest principle, which makes the most sense. maybe the dialogue is some vindication of death.
>>15422322
I think this is at the heart of a lot of religions. You have the ones that posit two origins of everything, good and evil, such as manichaeism, zoroastrianism and maybe some tribal religions. then you have "Good" at the origin, and everything bad is explained in terms of decline, such as Hinduism. and then you have the abrahamic religions, a bit different but you could view the fall as the origin and the eschatological theories as the just end, going from evil to good.
I'm not sure how one would derive these things from reason.

[Anonymous No.15422375]

>>15422350
lmao lets try ??
it cant be that hard surely

i guess we have to take the standpoint that all theese have in common and thats a higher power/creator right?

[Anonymous No.15422383]

>>15422375
i guess the hard part is logically comeing to that but we can just word play it into existance LMAO

[Anonymous No.15422388]

>>15422383
so logically if we define the higher power as reality itself or atribute creative agency to the universe pretty much solves it you could go religion by religon and do this with w/e

[Anonymous No.15422438]

>>15417755
Your first mistake was reading Plato and expecting to get any philosophical wisdom. The only reason you should read their texts is so you can get an understanding of the history of philosophy. Don't try to take any of their ideas seriously.

[Anonymous No.15422455]

>>15422438
cringe modern take. read strauss

[Anonymous No.15422470]

>>15422455
>strauss
another /lit/ tier pseud actually incapable of thinking thus resigning himself to dogmatic worship of the "canon".

[Anonymous No.15422477]

>>15417755
Plato was wrong and Socrates was a fag. Read Aristotle

[Anonymous No.15422881]

>>15422438

[Anonymous No.15422964]

>>15420246
socrates didn't exist

[Anonymous No.15423006]

>>15422245
Are there any other companion-type books you'd recommend? Particularly any that will spoonfeed me commentary?
I've been coming out of a long depressive fugue and haven't read anything in a while. I read the Republic years ago and even though I really only tangled with it on a surface level it still made an impact on me, I'd like to explore that more.

[Anonymous No.15424775]

>>15420897
I never said his refusal to write invalidates his ideas, I said his ideas are why he refused to write.