Symposium
In his celebrated masterpiece, Symposium, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC. The guests--including the comic poet Aristophanes and Plato's mentor Socrates--each deliver a short speech in praise of love. The sequence of dazzling speeches culminates in Socrates' famous...
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In his celebrated masterpiece, Symposium, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC. The guests--including the comic poet Aristophanes and Plato's mentor Socrates--each deliver a short speech in praise of love. The sequence of dazzling speeches culminates in Socrates' famous account of the views of Diotima, a prophetess who taught him that love is our means of trying to attain goodness, and a brilliant sketch of Socrates himself by a drunken Alcibiades, the most popular and notorious Athenian of the time. Engaging the reader on every page, this new translation conveys the power, humor, and pathos of Plato's creation and is complemented by full explanatory notes and an illuminating introduction.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780192834270 (0192834274)
Publish date: July 9th 1998
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Pages no: 160
Edition language: English
(Original Review, 2003-03-02)The problem for me is that philosophy is surely about ideas which are themselves constructed out of language. Dinosaurs, or evidence for them in the fossil record, are not linguistic constructs - but philosophical ideas would seem to be. If you're into stuff like thi...
You've really got to love the way Plato writes philosophy. Whereas everybody else simply writes what is in effect a work of non-fiction explaining some ideas, Plato seems to have the habit of inserting them into a story. Okay, he may not be the only philosopher that uses a story to convey his philos...
When I was a young man, I and my friends certainly had some strange conversations, possibly aided by some substances of questionable legality in certain countries, but we never quite managed to attain the heights of strangeness reached at this banquet/drinking party(*) held in 416 BCE when Socrates ...
Where the phrase "Platonic love" came from. Contains some of the most well-known ideas & arguments in classical Greek philosophy. I read the free Benjamin Jowett translation, & it's also sort of interesting to see how a Victorian attempted to "explain away" certain stuff in his "introduction".
I suppose one should read some Plato to be considered an educated person. I really want to be an educated person, but this is an example of a book I would never get around to reading if I weren't pushed by some situation outside of myself. In this case the push came from a book group of which I am ...
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