Plato’s Symposium: Love and Philosophy

level: introductory/intermediate, Duration: 5 weeks

In the Republic, Socrates refers to the “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” as the deepest cause of the division in our opinions about the best way of life. In the Symposium, Plato enacts this quarrel by showing Socrates giving a speech on a subject which seems to be the preserve of the poets: eros. This speech is in a contest that of two poets, a tragedian and a comic poet, as well as other speakers who represent science, political ambition, and various other perspectives.

Socrates’ own perspective seeks to show that our greatest longings are met only in philosophy, which comprehends the various other kinds of desire we experience. The appeal of the other speeches, especially those of the poets, leads us into a broad examination of human nature and its ends.

Plato Republic: An Introduction to the Fundamental Book of Philosophy

level: INTERMEDIATE, Duration: 10 weeks

This course is an introduction to Plato’s most important work, which transformed the relations between philosophy and political or human life. The Republic was the first major work to present an argument that human reason can both guide the individual human life to happiness and order the political community to justice.

In addition to its effect on the ancient world, and in the Christian, Islamic and Jewish traditions, the Republic ultimately provided the elements for the philosophical revolution that gave birth to the Enlightenment and modernity.

However, when examined apart from all these traditions and interpretations, the Republic may itself provide a more profound and complex understanding of the essential questions of human life that we still face today.

What is the truth? Plato’s Image of the Cave and Heidegger’s Essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth”

level: introductory, Duration: 5 weeks

The problem of our time (relativism, nihilism, lack of meaning or principles, unhappiness, etc.) has one core: we do not believe there is any truth about what is good and bad in life. This belief is held by many because they believe its consequences are good: they equate relativism with toleration for a diversity of views. This belief is obviously self-contradictory, but logical consistency is not a primary quality of influential world-historical ideologies.

This course will question that belief by examining the two main alternatives to it, as articulated by Plato and Heidegger. If you are new to them Plato and Heidegger the course will provide a good introduction to their thought as we will be reading slowly and carefully a limited number of pages from a key text.

In Plato’s Republic (VII: 514a-521b) Socrates provides an image of people dwelling in a cave as an analogy of the relation between the search for the truth and the bonds of opinion in civil society. That image has in all times elicited the desire of those whose nature is inclined to the truth to begin their quest, as well as tempering their expectations for revolutionary change in society.

Heidegger is one of the greatest philosophical minds who has used his powers to argue that this entire way of thinking (i.e., philosophy) is in error. He claims that this picture of the truth prevents one from living authentically within one’s society and also grounds the modern technological undercutting of human life.

We will study this question through a close reading of Heidegger’s essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” which builds from a translation and interpretation of Plato’s cave image in the Republic. (The essay appeared in his collection, Pathmarks: a pdf of this essay and of a translation of Republic 514a-521b will be supplied).

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