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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