When I was an undergraduate, I participated in an intensive summer program in Classical Greek language and one of the sections of the course was to read one of Plato\u2019s dialogs (Ion) and sections from the Republic.\u00a0 And that was interesting because after having read a bunch of Plato in translation I always wondered if maybe it lost something in translation.\u00a0 It seemed that the stuff Socrates said was a bunch of nonsense.\u00a0 Maybe if read in the original it would seem less silly.\u00a0 But that summer I was disabused of that hope.\u00a0 Nothing was lost in translation.\u00a0 It was goofy stuff.<\/p>\n
All of Socrates intellectual opponents in these dialogs are straw men who are set up to allow Plato to go through his dialectical arguments proving that no one knows anything but Socrates and therefore the world should be ruled by philosopher-kings that have been trained by Plato and his fellow philosophers at the Academy.<\/p>\n
Okay, I\u2019m pretty dismissive of the father of Western philosophy.\u00a0 But there really is no other position I can see.\u00a0 But by the same token he is also the man who attracted Aristotle to Athens and thereby brought him to the attention of the world.\u00a0 So, building the first western university did have many positive effects.\u00a0 After all Aristotle was Alexander the Great\u2019s tutor and Alexander is responsible for building Alexandria in Egypt and Alexandria became a great center for learning and science under Ptolemy; one of Alexander\u2019s successors.\u00a0 So, good for you Plato.<\/p>\n
Having never systematically studied Plato\u2019s life I read this book to see what incites might be hidden there.\u00a0 Unfortunately, there is not much esoteric knowledge that a scholar can add to the corpus of Plato\u2019s work.\u00a0 Most of what\u2019s there is the common legend and what\u2019s added by conjecture doesn\u2019t really matter to anyone but possibly a specialist who wants to speculate whether the Republic was written in which range of years and before or after some other dialog such as Gorgias.<\/p>\n
What I did enjoy was the sections of the book that reviewed the history of Athens and other parts of the Hellenic world in Plato\u2019s time.\u00a0 Plato lived during the end of the Peloponnesian War and the defeat of Athens.\u00a0 He lived under the reign of the Thirty Tyrants.\u00a0 In fact, several of his family members belonged to that regime which he eventually denounced.\u00a0 Of course, the following regime that restored democracy to Athens also condemned his mentor and friend Socrates to death so Plato\u2019s political and partisan feelings were early on buffeted by harsh reality.\u00a0 But the facts of the times are interesting and useful for consideration.\u00a0 Plato\u2019s later dabbling with practical politics when he attempted to convert the notorious tyrant Dionysus II of Syracuse into a philosopher-king is almost farcically unrealistic.\u00a0 The fallout from this attempt should have been enough to single-handedly destroy Plato\u2019s reputation as a practical philosopher but time heals all wounds.<\/p>\n
I guess I\u2019m of two minds as to how to recommend this book.\u00a0 If someone is interested in Plato\u2019s work and his philosophical ideas then this book will be of interest.\u00a0 If someone is interested in the very important time period after the end of the Peloponnesian War until right before Alexander the Great there is some interesting insights here.\u00a0 But unless both apply, I think most readers will have to pick and choose through the sections of the book.<\/p>\n
For instance, I find Plato\u2019s Theory of Forms utter nonsense.\u00a0 The idea that there is an ideal form of a tree or a shoemaker or a door seems to me the working of the mind of a doofus.\u00a0 Even the idea of the ideal of a geometric shape like a sphere or a cube seems an unnecessary addition to reality.\u00a0 So, the section on this doctrine holds no interest for me.\u00a0 And in fact, I find most of Plato\u2019s philosophical doctrines not very useful for human life.\u00a0 But that\u2019s how I\u2019ve judged most of philosophy.\u00a0 Although Aristotle seemed to have had a more practical view of the world and the things in it.\u00a0 Maybe I should have looked for a new biography of Aristotle.\u00a0 Oh well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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