I started reading philosophy one month ago and so far I have finished the early socratic dialogues by Plato (Listed at the end of the post). Plato is very subtle and humble in his knowledge, so help me understand if what I'm interpreting is correct or not. He always plays humble to question his opponents but it seems like his arguing always goes in the same direction when arguing about "what is virtue", but he never finishes the idea. From what I read I assume that, for Plato, "virtue", in every form, comes from knowledge. Is this correct? He always compares the other forms of "virtue" and at the end they all come from knowledge, so am I missinterpreting something? Is Socrathes/Plato playing like a cat with a mouse when saying that "they don't know what virtue is"? Or am I missing something and he really doesn't know it? I understand that Socrathes' philosophy is "All I know is that I know nothing" but it seems to be a subtle answer hidden in his questions. Dialogues are: Apology, Laches, Charmides, Lysis, Eutyphro, Hippias minor, Ion, Crito, Protagoras, Gorgias, and Euthydemus.
>>23627199But what is virtue? Is it nobility? Is it wisdom? It comes from knowledge but is it knowledge? Wouldn't it be wisdom? Is it destiny, acceptability? Uprightness? Forthrightness? Is it strength? Health? Wealth? Happiness? Sunlight?
>>23627259Virtues are qualities of character, if cultivated, lead men to excellence and eudomonia, or happiness. For aristotle and plato real happiness is not from pleasure, but from virtue, and virtue is cultivated by knowledge. In different situations you have to know how to act based on factors in order to be brave, but not rash or callous.
>>23627199He makes this point more explicit in his Republic.
>>23627199A good moment for ask: what dialogues should someone who already finished Meno and Apology read next?
Virtue is not knowledge itself, but the pursuit of knowledge. For Plato, true knowledge is something can never fully grasp.
Plato’s substantive ideas are not the reason he is suggest to read first. Yes he’s the first in the philosophical lineage, but he’s the easiest one to read. Understanding his methods and procedure of argument is the key takeaway. Literally the Socratic method. Everyone you subsequently read is going to say they have a super unique and different take on the substantive content he spews. It’s all pretty straightforward.
>>23627199The cheat code of Plato is to read Definitions, it answers many important questions with few words.>Virtue— a (mental) constitution of the best kind; a habit of a mortal living being; the object of praise on account of itself; a habit, according to which that, which possesses it, is said to be good; a just communion of laws; a disposition, according to which that, which is constituted perfectly, is called steady; a habit, effective of a good state of law.
>>23627199You have to read the pre-socratics before the post-socratics, bro.(only partially joking; if you have a solid grip on the earlier thinkers you will easily spot all the errors in Plato, Aristotle, and others)
>>23628221Would you recommend Heraclitus and Parmenides?
>>23627199Early Plato is much more Socratic, in that he doesn't come to ultimate philosophical knowledge, or comes to less of it. He is concerned with ethics, which means ethics in thinking as well as acting. Once you get to middle period Plato you'll get to all the stuff Plato has been hinting at here.Late period Plato is super esoteric and revises and calls into question a ton of his own philosophy.
>>23627762From the ones I've read:I would recommend Gorgias and Protagoras if you want to read Socrates arguing against sophists. I would recommend Crito and Eutyphro if you want to read the trilogy of Socrathes and his trial. (I think there is a fourth one but haven't read it yet.)
>>23628221Stop trying to mislead noobs with your ideological convictions. Plato is the greatest Greek thinker and a perfectly good start for beginners, because he introduces beginners to the ideas of those before him and of the general climate of Greek thought. A beginner is not going to have some Heideggerian or Guenonian education to understand what the hell Parmenides was on about. He will just make the classic mistake of seeing their ideas as overly simplistic. What Plato says about Heraclitus in the Symposium, for example, will be a great aid to them when they read him.
>>23628775>(I think there is a fourth one but haven't read it yet.)The Phaedo but it's middle period Plato so you don't have to read it in order.
>>23627801this
>>23627199>ibid. Orphic Roots of PlatonismHumanitas for the Romans was potential until actual, as made so by cultivation. Little daylight on that count between Rome and Athens. Go straight through to the Late Platonics and Pythagoreans once you're done (and Aristotle).
>>23628779>>23627801So am I a virtuous man if I pursue knowledge? What if the knowledge I am pursuing is deceitful, like the sophists for example?
>>23628780>>23627801>>23627806>>23628221>>23628774>>23628776Sorry for mass pinging but you seem to know about this topic. Are there charts for philosophy? I am not a philosophy student so I don't know which philosophers to read. I heard Plato is a good start, then Aristotle, then Epicurus, but I am completely lost after that. Is there something like picrel but more like a road to grasp philosophy? I don't like picrel that much because it skips a lot of things of Plato. Right now I feel like if I were creating a "relationship" with Plato and Socrates and that wouldn't be the case if I only read some dialogues and not all. The same happened to me with the Bible whereas I felt a "relationship" with Jesus. Maybe what I'm trying to say is that I get to know the author deeply.
>>23628789author/character*
>>23627199I think you're more or less on the right track. To specifically address your question about knowledge and virtue, maybe it helps to have the following setup in mind:>Dialogues about particular virtues:>Laches: Courage>Charmides: Moderation>Republic: Justice>Theages: Wisdom [keep in mind this one is contested, scholarship has started to lean away from a strong insistence on inauthenticity when it's treated at all; also, ancient dialogue headings sometimes call it "On Wisdom" and sometimes "On the Daimonion"]>Euthyphro: Piety>Theaetetus: KnowledgeAnd then there’s two dialogues on virtue as a whole and whether it's teachable, Protagoras and Meno. These dialogues as a whole can be fruitfully checked against one another, since the different circumstances for each subject's presentation can open up fresh ways to see what's going on (the Republic's account of the virtues and their relation to wisdom, for example, or how those virtues are inculcated there as a tentative response to whether virtue is teachable, or the distinction there drawn between virtues as they really are and demotic or popular virtues).The other thing to note that unites the subjects of virtue and knowledge is the soul, and one of the most important attitudes of the soul treated is Eros. In several dialogues, Socrates repeats variations on "all I know is of the things of which I'm ignorant", with the further qualification that he's an expert in "erotics". This is said in Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Theages, and it's intimated in the Symposium to be the same as his knowledge of ignorance. These, knowledge of ignorance and of erotics, seem to also appear as Socrates' art of midwifing in the Theaetetus.This is all a lot of work, obviously, but going through these dialogues dealing with knowledge of ignorance and erotics seems to be the path into the Forms, on the one hand, and self-understanding, on the other.
>>23627199Holy shit they're ballin'
bump
Sorry but if your idea cannot be summarised into an A4 page your idea is simply not worth considering.
>>23629487>idea Imagine reading someone who only had 1 (one) single idea
>>23628768Yes, absolutely, with a modern introduction that isn't so much giving you a single interpretation so much as describing the lay of the land and different ways the fragments have been received. This is absolutely a better way to do philosophy, rather than just going straight to Plato and having him lock you in his goon cave.>>23628776I am definitely not recommending Heidegger or any other German. And on that point about the germs, you'll be no less deceived if Plato is your first contact with the ancient thinkers. Plato won't greatly aid you in reading the ancient philosophers, he'll just blinker you and make you treat them like a meme that he "solved" or "harmonised", like a mediaeval saying his brand of Christianity is the fulfillment of philosophy or some other such convenient nonsense. Aristotle is even more blatant in his convenient mistreatment of them, although maybe his blatant approach is preferable to Plato's honeyed lies.
>>23627308Somehow neither descriptive nor prescriptive but words words words of ah wouldn't it be nice if such a thing as virtue existed whereby it's cultivation from knowledge lead to a higher form of happiness not of pleasure but of virtue. If only you knew how to act based on virtue you would know what virtue is
OP here. I finished Menon today. Plato introduces reminiscence in this dialogue, which is the belief that we already know everything but we need to "remember it". I didn't really get how he got to that conclusion but I guess he will later. For me, what he did with the boy, is easy to explain. We gather information in our brains, but knowledge comes from the correct connection of said inforation. So for example, I can get the information of what a line is, and what the number 4 is, and to know what is a square I connect both inside y brain. But these connections only come through indagation or questioning. I am not a neuroscientist, but this is how the brain works with neurons and neurons' connections, right? I know this is supposed to be idealist and not materialism but I can't really understand his logic here. Does he thinks that because the soul is immortal, then that means it's eternal, then the soul lived an infinite amount of time before us, thus the soul knowed everything at some point? Or am I missing something? So he doesn't beliefs that the soul "started" somewhere, but that it always existed?
>>23631612I think Recollection is meant to be something that encourages investigation in the face of a particular kind of dogmatic skepticism, while not necessarily being an adequate account of knowledge by itself. If you look at how Socrates initially discusses it, the soul is in fact said to learn things in Hades, hence it doesn't just automatically have knowledge that it needs to recall once embodied ("Inasmuch as the soul is immortal and has been born many times and has seen all things both here and in the house of Hades, there is nothing which it has not learned.")The purpose of it, at the point it appears in the dialogue, is to prevent Meno from deciding that investigation is pointless and remaining satisfied with his mere opinions. You should also observe that Recollection immediately after the slaveboy example gets replaced with hypothesis as a method of investigation.Recollection comes up again in both the Phaedrus and Phaedo, but in the Phaedrus it's in a myth that seems to emphasize that there's not total knowledge, but glimpses of the Forms (called hyperuranins there), and in the Phaedo, it's just assumed that Recollection works and is used only to attempt to prove the immortality of the soul (and it's played off a little as a joke; the two main speakers Socrates talks to are Pythagoreans who can't remember this topic that Socrates sometimes brings up that resembles the Pythagorean teaching of the transmigration of the soul).
>>23628768You can read all their fragments in like 10 minutes
we Ballin
At that point Plato really didn't think he knew.
>>23632199Should I just watch a youtube video about them? I don't think it's worth to search for the best translation and an edition online just to read 10 minutes.
bump so this stays overnight
