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October 4, 2009
Plato and crankiness
Tomorrow we start The Symposium in Euro Studies 101. Talk about mood swings!
I appreciate Plato much more now that I am an adult. Plato was a great artist. However, I think he's a deeply tricky one - and probably even not particularly honest. I don't believe in his Socrates at all - just one quick read through Xenophon makes you realize that in a world of opposing evidence we can't just say that Plato is right - unless, of course, we are professors of philosophy who think that full-time philosophers are inherently more reliable than soldiers.
So tomorrow I'm starting off with about 15 or 25 minutes of pictures of symposia, masks of Dionysus, and Greek homosexuality. I'm an art historian, after all - and these folks get to deal with visual evidence along with translated texts.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at October 4, 2009 7:39 PM
Comments
Plato would -- in fact, did -- say that full-time philosophers are inherently more reliable than soldiers! See the Republic. And we philosophers don't care that much about the historical reliability of his Socrates, anyway. Guess that's why we're philosophers and not historians, huh?
.....Yup - but if you people would get over the Queen of the Sciences silliness ( and submit to Theology!) we could talk. I've never met a philosopher who's (a) not a specialist in period and who (b) has read Xenophon's version. Of course the classical philosophers have, but the rest of them. No. Kinda problematic, on the evidential point of view. But then Xenophon's Oeconomicus = Plato's Republic in all KINDS of ways, and why we're not all more interested in that never ceases to amaze me. I think that Philosopher Kings and 35 year old Men Married to 15 y.o. Girls are pretty much entirely parallel!
Oh - thanks for putting the whuppin' on the Vols. Much appreciated! --MCT
Posted by: Kalynne Pudner at October 4, 2009 8:40 PM
I agree that Plato can be a beautiful writer, although I wonder I can trust his vision of a perfect society dominated by philosopher-kings. The Socratic dialogues can be quite illuminating as well. Finally, I prefer Aristotle's straightforward formulations, but he can be as dry as dust (something shared by his great successor, Thomas Aquinas.)
......Oh, I know the answer to your first sentence. No, thank you. Just imagine a university run by its philosophy department and you don't want to go any further with THAT experiment. I told the early arrivers today that I am really not fair to Plato, given that so far as I'm philosophical at all I'm an Aristotelian Materialist via Thomas myself. --MCT
Posted by: John Thomas McGuire at October 5, 2009 6:01 PM