Plato

Catalog description

Plato has had, along with his student Aristotle, the greatest influence on the history of Western philosophy of any writer. He synthesized politics and ethics, pedagogy and dialectics, psychology and epistemology, metaphysics and ontology, and even cosmology and theology. He founded Europe's first research institute, which cultivated mathematicians, astronomers, psychologists, rhetoricians, literary scholars, and of course philosophers. He lived at a time of profound political upheaval, in a democratic Athens that had just lost a war of imperial expansion. He wrote dozens of dramatic dialogues, among the greatest works of prose ever, celebrating his teacher Socrates, stunning his readers into puzzlement, and posing problems of self-understanding that would set the philosophical agenda for centuries to come. His works have appealed to skeptics and mystics, formal theorists and creative writers, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and philosophers of a wide range of sensibilities. This course studies a variable range of his dialogues, with the goal of getting a broad and deep understanding of this author, his intellectual context, and his philosophical reception. Students will also learn about the features of Plato's thought and world that remain culturally salient - the Academy, the Forms, Platonic love, Socratic ignorance, the dialogue form, Platonism and Neoplatonism, and the distinctiveness of Greek philosophy.