Category: Plato
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Plato’s Cave
Here is a very good animation of Plato's Parable of the Cave, from Book VII of The Republic.
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Plato’s Cave and the Garden of Eden
An archeologist who claimed to have uncovered the site of Plato's Cave would be dismissed as either a prankster or a lunatic. There never was any such cave as is described in the magnificent Book VII of Plato's Republic. And there never were any such cave-dwellers or goings-on as the ones described in Plato's story. …
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Pseudo-Intellectual Tripe from William Sloane Coffin
William Sloane Coffin (Credo, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. 5) thinks to correct Socrates and Descartes but makes a fool of himself in the process. Here is what he says: Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living. Descartes too was mistaken;…
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Plato
Both his greatness as a thinker and the probity of his quest for truth are revealed in the fact that Plato is not only the father of the Theory of Forms, but also the author of the most penetrating criticisms of them. (By the way, the above aphorism is crafted in such a way as…
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A Platonist at Breakfast
I head out early one morning with wifey in tow. I’m going to take her to a really fancy joint this time, the 5 and Diner, a greasy spoon just dripping with 1950s Americana. We belly up to the counter –where I can keep an eye on the waitresses — and order the $2. 98…
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The Perils of Pleasure
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis: The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my…
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Political Action and the Principle of Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien
Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good." Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Obama, who has proven that he is a disaster for the country, got in in part because of conservatives who could not abide McCain. Politics is a practical business. It…
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Simone Weil in the Light of Plato, Phaedo 83
To understand Simone Weil, you must understand her beloved master, Plato. So let's interpret a passage from the Phaedo, and then compare it to some statements of Weil. At St. 83 we read, "…the perceptions of the eye, and the ear, and the the senses are full of deceit." The point is presumably not that…
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The Meno Paradox and the Difference Between Paradoxes and Arguments
S. C. e-mails: I stumbled onto a question in my studies today that I am not sure how to resolve and you seem like just the person to ask. The question is this: what, exactly, makes a paradox different from a regular old argument? Consider: we tend to call paradoxes those arguments which seem sound…
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Can Existence Be Analyzed in Terms of Power? Commentary on Sophist 247e
At Sophist 247e, Plato puts the following into the mouth of the Eleatic Stranger: I suggest that anything has real being that is so constituted as to possess any sort of power either to affect anything else or to be affected, in however small a degree, by the most insignificant agent, though it be only once. …
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Approaching Plato: A Guide to the Early and Middle Dialogues
This just over the transom from Mark Anderson, Department of Philosophy. Belmont University: I have enjoyed your site, which I recently discovered. I, too, am something of a recovering academician, but I am still in the academy. I am trying to develop a means of teaching philosophy while still practicing philosophy, to be a professor…