Athens, c. 428–348 BCE
Plato
Student of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, founder of the Academy. His dialogues — the Republic, Symposium, Phaedo — set the terms of Western metaphysics.
Plato in 28 lines
Every Plato passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.”
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.”
“The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself.”
“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination.”
“Courage is knowing what not to fear.”
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
“I shall assume that your silence gives consent.”
“No man of sense can put himself and his soul under the control of names... You must consider courageously and thoroughly and not accept anything carelessly.”
“Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.”
“Perception and knowledge could never be the same.”
“No one should be discouraged, Theaetetus, who can make constant progress, even though it be slow.”
“No multitude is able to acquire any art whatsoever. Then if there is a kingly art, neither the collective body of the wealthy nor the whole people could ever acquire this science of statesmanship.”
“Parmenides: It is impossible to conceive of many without one.”
“Parmenides: Just as things in a picture, when viewed from a distance, appear to be all in one and the same condition and alike.”
“Zeno: The many do not know that except by this devious passage through all things the mind cannot attain to the truth.”
“The orators — and the despots — have the least power in their cities … since they do nothing that they wish to do, practically speaking, though they do whatever they think to be best.”
“It would be better for me … that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.”
“The wisdom which knows what are and are not dangers is opposed to the ignorance of them”
“Socrates: But suppose the words used are ‘just’ and ‘good’. Don’t we then go each his own way, and find ourselves in disagreement with ourselves as well as with each other? / Phaedrus: Undoubtedly.”
“Neither family, nor privilege, nor wealth, nor anything but Love can light that beacon which a man must steer by when he sets out to live the better life.”
“For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet”
“The beginning in every task is the chief thing.”
“There is no one who ever acts honestly in the administration of states, nor any helper who will save any one who maintains the cause of the just.”
“Then we may begin by assuming that there are three classes of men—lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, lovers of gain?”
“My love, Alcibiades, which I hardly like to confess, would long ago have passed away, as I flatter myself, if I saw you loving your good things, or thinking that you ought to pass life in the enjoyment of them.”
“You want to know whether I can make a long speech, such as you are in the habit of hearing; but that is not my way.”
“Socrates: The shoemaker, for example, uses a square tool, and a circular tool, and other tools for cutting?”
Where Plato lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
Love asks you to change in ways you did not expect.
You are seeing love as formation, not merely preference. The risk is surrendering under the nobler name of devotion.
Reading Plato today
Plato wrote in c. 428–348 BCE, from Athens — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Plato is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 28 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Aristotle — Greece, 384–322 BCE
- Confucius — China, 551–479 BCE
- Heraclitus — Ephesus, c. 535–475 BCE
- Protagoras — Greece, c. 490–420 BCE
- Pythagoras — Samos & Croton, c. 570–495 BCE
- Socrates — Athens, c. 470–399 BCE
Argues the same cases
Confucius, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aristotle, Lao Tzu take positions on the same dilemmas as Plato, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.