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Plato: Dialogues
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Plato was born in 427 B.C. in Athens to an aristocratic family. His father, Ariston, traced his family back through several of the ancient kings of Athens to the god Poseidon. His mother, Perictione, was decended from Dropides, who was a relative and close friend of Solon. Her brother was Charmides and her cousin was Critias, both of whom were well known politicians of the day. Plato had two older brothers, Adeimantus and Glaucon, and a sister, Potone. Plato's father died while Plato was a boy and Perictione married her uncle, by whom she had a boy, Antiphon, whom Plato mentions in one of his dialogues.
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Plato was born into a wealth Athenian family and planned to become a politician. As he grew older, he became repulsed by the brutal and unethical practices of Athenian dictators. In 399 B.C.E. he left Athens when his friend Socrates was sentenced to death. Twelve years later, he founded a school of philosophy and science called the Academy, the first university. Plato is famous for his written dialogues, conversations between two or more characters debating philosophical issues.
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Plato's own great contributions begin to appear in the second group of writings, which date from the period between his first and second voyages to Sicily. To this second group belong the Meno, Cratylus, Euthydemus, Menexenus, Symposium, Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus, Parmenides, and Theaetetus. Development of ideas in the earlier dialogues is discernible in these works. The Meno carries on the question of the teachability of virtue first dealt with in Protagoras and introduces the doctrine of anamnesis (recollection), which plays an important role in Plato's view of the human's ability to learn the truth. Since the soul is immortal and has at an earlier stage contemplated the Forms, or Ideas, which are the eternal and changeless truths of the universe, humans do not learn, but remember.
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The son of wealthy and influential Athenian parents, Plato began his philosophical career as a student of Socrates. When the master died, Plato travelled to Egypt and Italy, studied with students of Pythagoras, and spent several years advising the ruling family of Syracuse. Eventually, he returned to Athens and established his own school of philosophy at the Academy. For students enrolled there, Plato tried both to pass on the heritage of a Socratic style of thinking and to guide their progress through mathematical learning to the achievement of abstract philosophical truth. The written dialogues on which his enduring reputation rests ... serve both of these aims.
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In the dialogues for which Plato is most celebrated and admired, Socrates is concerned with human and political virtue, has a distinctive personality, and friends and enemies who "travel" with him from dialogue to dialogue. This is not to say that Socrates is consistent: a man who is his friend in one dialogue may be an adversary or subject of his mockery in another. For example, Socrates praises the wisdom of Euthyphro many times in the Cratylus, but makes him look like a fool in the Euthyphro. He disparages sophists generally, and Prodicus specifically in the Apology, yet tells Theaetetus in his namesake dialogue that he admires Prodicus and has directed many pupils to him. In Cratylus (384b-c), Socrates says that he studied with Cratylus, and took his one-drachma course because he could not afford the full fifty-drachma course. Socrates' ideas are ... not consistent within or between or among dialogues.
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It should come as no surprise that in the two dialogues where Plato focuses on the individual soul he does not require a total submergence in the common weal. Instead there is a picture of self-improvement and self-completion. The Symposium is often treated as a dialogue that predates the Republic, most of all because it does not mention the tri-partition of the soul. But not only is its topic, the praise of Eros by all those present, ill suited to the period of the Gorgias and the Phaedo with their spirit of asceticism, but Plato has good reasons for leaving aside a separation of the soul's faculties and a compartmentalization of their aims and values in order to show that love is an incentive for all human beings. Contrary to the assumption of all other speakers in the Symposium, Socrates denies that Eros is a god since the gods are perfect; love, by contrast, is a kind of desire for the beautiful and the good (199c-201c). Thus, all previous speakers have confused love with the beloved.
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