The Socratic Dialogues Middle Period, Volume 1: Symposium, Theaetetus, Phaedo

Ukemi's Socratic Dialogues

by Plato, Benjamin Jowett (Translator)

Here are three important but very different Dialogues from the Middle Period. Symposium, the most well-known in this collection, is concerned with the theme of love. In the house of Agathon, a group of friends - each very different in personality and background - meet to consider and discuss various kinds of love. Each one, Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes (the playwright) and Agathon (a prize-winning tragic poet), presents his particular view in a short discourse until Socrates speaks at greater length. This would be the end except that, unexpectedly, Alcibiades (the vain general and controversial statesman) arrives, rather worse for drink, and makes his loud contribution with direct references to his personal relationship with Socrates. Symposium is an absorbing Dialogue, related, however, by one man - Apollodorus. It is read here by Hugh Ross.

Phaedo is a very different Dialogue. It contains the moving account of the last hours of Socrates. Condemned to death by the Athenian court for impiety and the corruption of youth, he has been ordered to commit suicide. Friends gather around him on this last day, but even at such a moment Socrates chooses to spend the time considering the nature of the soul, whether it is immortal and what may happen after death. It concludes with a description of his final moments.

In Theaetetus, Socrates engages with a young mathematician on the definition of knowledge, the examined life, and how the active life compares with the contemplative life.

Translation by Benjamin Jowett.

Genres: Philosophy, Audiobook, Nonfiction

Audiobook

Published November 20, 2017

About the author

Plato (Greek: Πλάτων), born Aristocles (c. 427 – 348 BC), was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms. He raised problems for what became all the major areas of both theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy, and was the founder of the Platonic Academy, a philosophical school in Athens where Plato taught the doctrines that would later become known as Platonism.
Plato's most famous contribution is the theory of forms (or ideas), which has been interpreted as advancing a solution to what is now known as the problem of universals. He was decisively influenced by the pre-Socratic thinkers Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, although much of what is known about them is derived from Plato himself.
Along with his teacher Socrates, and Aristotle, his student, Plato is a central figure in the history of philosophy. Plato's entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years—unlike that of nearly all of his contemporaries. Although their popularity has fluctuated, they have consistently been read and studied through the ages. Through Neoplatonism, he also greatly influenced both Christian and Islamic philosophy. In modern times, Alfred North Whitehead famously said: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."

Reviews

[sch]

8-10 May 2019. PHAEDO, with two readers in the frame, one of whom performs all the parts of the dialogue proper; he gives each character a distinct tone, but some of the sentences in the dialectical portions are misread (the emPHAsis is on the wrong syLLAble, so to speak).

6-8 May 2019. THEAETETUS, with three readers in the brief introduction/frame, and three more in the lengthy dialogue. A clear dramatic scene: Socrates, the young Theaetetus who resembles him in both body and mind, and the aged geometrician Theodorus. Intriguing biographical material on Socrates. Quite difficult in the middle, but such passages are alleviated by vivid metaphors for knowledge, learning, and recollection. Nevertheless ends in aporia, after the failure of three definitions of knowledge (cf. argumentative structure of MENO).

3-4 May 2019. As summer begins, resuming my Plato project. Feeling confident about the SYMPOSIUM. Finished, one reader after the “frame.” As before, pleasant, charming, inspiring.

[Daniel]

The Symposium: An interesting read, even to understand the Athenian society in the time of Socrates and Plato. To understand how common and even promoted homosexuality was in that time and that even the idea of applying a category such as homosexuality is anachronistic to the kinds of romantic and sexual relationships these men shared. A series of interesting speeches by comrades drinking wine they start off as more poetical, such as showing how strong the love between soldiers is, or mythological, by explaining how originally lovers were a single creature that was divided and then both parts spend their lives longing to be reunited into that primordial whole. Things change when Socrates turn comes up and, by telling what a woman he once loved told him, he adds a philosophical twist to love. He explains how love should be seen as actually the love of beauty and of good and how philosophy, by pursuing these ideals, is the purest form of love. The dialogue ends with Alcibiades making a passionate speech about Socrates that I personally feel expresses the feelings that Plato actually had for his master.

Theaetetus: The best dialogue in this trio. Socrates' analogy of being a midwife of ideas is charming and, ideally, that's what he should be. But often in these dialogues I get a sensation that he leads the discussion to points where he wants to get at instead of just making dialectical inquiry and philosophical investigation. The discussion itself is fascinating, starting from a point of pure empiricism to set what knowledge is but then leads on to combine experience with rationality into forming true opinion and tapping into the realm of ideas. A lot of times I feel that Socrates relies too much on language and thinks that simply by getting a clear linguistic description of knowledge and knowing would mean actually solving the issue. It's incredible to see how this dialogue sets the tone for more than 2000 years of epistemological debate and contains the seeds for many of the positions that would be further developed in western thought. Particularly, I see how it leads eventually to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigation and how he precisely questions how a definition would actually mean knowing something and even uses similar examples as being able to proceed with a mathematical series as proof that you know the series.

Phaedo: In contrast with Theaetetus, this is the worst of this trio. It's clear how relevant it is for Western philosophical and theological thought and gives dialectical foundations for the idea of the soul's immortality alongside with the conception of a world of pure ideas, immaterial and transcendental while the physical world would be corrupt and occur by necessity which the soul needs to surpass. Personally, I feel those are corrosive thoughts that have plagued western thought and the argumentation given by Socrates feels often very feeble. Given the setting, the last moments of the beloved master, it is understandable that the students would be eager to accept the idea that his soul would rest in a higher place, even when they seem to deny the possibility and restart the discussion. But when they say things like being thoroughly convinced by some analogy like saying that waking up comes after sleeping and as the two are inseparable so is being reborn after dying, but those are some pretty jarring logical leaps that happen all over this dialogue.

[Dan]

Symposium: A bunch of men party, get drunk, and decide to talk about love – mainly about their love for young men. Socrates tells them what he learned from a woman, while Alcibiades – a late arrival and extremely drunk – ends everything with a very passionate declaration of love towards Socrates. There are some amazing things said about one of the oldest of the gods here.

Theaetetus: After all these years, this dialogue still gets at the core of what knowledge is and at the relevant issues concerning knowledge. It seems that we moderns focused on one of the dimensions discussed here, and conveniently forgot the rest.

Phaedo: Probably the weakest of these three dialogues – it goes into the last few hours of Socrates, and on the nature of the soul and the issue of immortality and afterlife.

[Ana]

(2019 Year of Epic Reads Weekly Challenge #33: Read a book recommended by your book BFF.)


Socrates often comes off as arrogant. My favorite dialogue was Theatetus, but the digressions idealizing the philosopher as the perfect free man, a sentiment which also appears in Phaedo, were tedious and, to my understanding, silly. Finishing this book was a slow task, and not a very pleasurable one. But I do feel like I learned something from it.

[Kevin Yee]

(tr. Benjamin Jowlett)

[-H]

it's overall good, but it goes very exciting at some points, and i loved those. All finales are great. The books, from the inmortality of the soul, to love, to the willingness to die. Great.

[Tyler Horton]

I could almost feel grateful for hemlock. Socrates is insufferable and I don't think the recording helps. It's sort of halfway dramatized and it seems to make things worse.

[Abdul Alhazred]

This whole series is really the best way to hear the dialogues, which become much more alive and filled with a natural back and forth that's hard to tease out of the text on the page.

[Jonathan Skipper]

Phaedo was interesting

[Timothy Crouch]

The content… it’s Plato. Theaetetus is riveting. Symposium and Phaedo are less so — not coincidentally, they aren’t read by David Rintoul.

[Ell, Ess Jaeva]

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