Self Directed Study in Philosophy | Plato's Dialogues | Sadler's Advice

this is the first video in a new series directed at people who would like to engage in self-directed study of great thinkers texts and topics in the field of philosophy which is my area of specialization I get asked quite frequently by viewers subscribers fans people who come to my talks how can I study philosophy on my own is that possible for me is it feasible or do I need to go to a college in a university or sign up for some MOOC or something along those lines is it really possible for me and the answer is yes anybody can study philosophy but there are a lot of things to keep in mind and people then immediately ask what where should I start and my answer is almost always let's start with Plato Plato there's a lot of reasons why we should begin with him and I'm going to talk about that in a bit so this video is just about Plato and what you might think about or take into consideration as you're beginning your studies or continuing your studies as you're approaching his texts as you're digging into the dialogues I'm gonna give you some useful at least I hope it's useful for you advice and pointers and bring up some things that you might otherwise miss and I'm drawing upon about you know 20 years of teaching Plato I guess you could say that I have about 30 years experience of reading Plato or maybe even longer I'd have to think about exactly when it started because I know I got introduced to Plato in high school and I've been helping people outside of the field of academic philosophy engage with with philosophical thinkers and texts I'd say about the last ten years so I've got some ideas in mind that might be helpful for you I'm going to be bringing up a lot of different points in no particular order if you find something in here that's not particularly interesting just skip ahead but hopefully all of it should be useful for at least somebody the first topic that we should think about is well why should we study Plato in the first place meaning not just why should we study Plato at all but why should Plato be one of the first philosophers who we examine why not start with some 20th through 21st century thinkers somebody who's really contemporary or why not branch out into the the wider world of non-western philosophy and maybe look at you know Confucius or loud so or some some other writings or why not start if we're going to begin with Western philosophy Plato is not the first philosopher why not begin with the people that we call the pre-socratics and there are some good reasons for this when it comes to the contemporary stuff you know philosophy is a conversation that's been going on here in the West for over 2,000 years and you you can find some stuff in the in the present that doesn't really connect up much with with philosophies history but much of what you would encounter will have some reference to the past so it's it's not always helpful to jump right into the the newest stuff the newest is not always the best when it comes to philosophy when it comes to what we might call world philosophy or comparative philosophy or non Western philosophy there's nothing preventing you from doing that but if you want to study Western philosophy which is what I can help you with because I'm not an expert in comparative or non Western philosophy I think Plato is a really good place to begin and you might say well that's all fine but I know that there were some other thinkers before play know these pre-socratics like Heraclitus and i might have heard of our Parmenides or pythagoras and yes that's that's quite true but when it comes to possessing full texts Plato is really the beginning we don't have more than fragments or very short selections from most of these pre-socratic thinkers and as a matter of fact a lot of what we know about them comes to through Plato perhaps mediated through Socrates Plato's great teacher and his reflections on it or perhaps Plato's own study of these thinkers and so if we want to begin from a fairly systematic beginning point Plato's more the place to start you're gonna get plenty of the pre-socratics in in studying Plato and there's nothing to prevent you from going back and reading them anyway but I think that Plato is really a good starting point so he's really the first developed philosophical thought that we have access to now you know we could have some great discovery and find Heraclitus treatise on nature or Democritus or or you know Pythagorean writings or something like that that could happen but until it does Plato is really the place for us to begin with another key thing that I think recommends Plato is you're really getting a double whammy you're getting a lot of Plato's views but you're also getting some representative discussion of his teacher Socrates who is a major thinker of the early Western world and not just in terms of Platonism Socrates had a number of different followers who each you know established their own school we don't have a lot unfortunately of some of the what we call minor Socratic schools like the cynics and the Syriac hate heat in a school or the Megerian dialectical school but we do have you know Xenophon who is another student of Socrates and we can kind of take Plato and Xenophon and and compare them and contrast them and get a composite picture of this guy Socrates but our most developed picture of Socrates is really coming through Plato and so when you read about Socrates and the Platonic dialogues you can get a good sense of who this person was and why he mattered so much Plato is also going to be referenced by many other philosophers love them or hate them they're talking about play-doh it's not quite true to say as Alfred North Whitehead apparently did that you know philosophy is a set of footnotes to Plato that's going too far there's there's a lot of originality and new ideas coming about through other thinkers including Plato's own student Aristotle who founds his own school but Plato is an absolutely central partner in the conversation that is philosophy and indeed culture in general in the West going up to the present like I said you know whether you agree with Plato or whether you think that he's the the origin of all sorts of problems and misunderstandings away you know some philosophers do portray him like for example Friedrich Nietzsche he's somebody you need to know he is somebody who is worth studying so that you have a good sense of what's going on in philosophy so those are some some good reasons to to study Plato I would say that there's a few others that we might bring up one is that we're gonna talk about this a little bit more when we go into what a dialogue consists of what's really cool about Plato's dialogues is that they're they're genuine dialogues they're not just you might say pasteboard characters who don't really disagree with each other embody some sort of point of view you'll get to learn a lot about you might say ancient Athens and Greece in general and different ways of approaching issues and problems not just in philosophy I mean you're getting a lot of as I said pre-socratic philosophers and the people that we call the Sophists and rhetorician --zz you're also getting military leaders you're also getting people who are cultural producers who are trying to explain or produce poetry you're getting craftspeople you're getting all sorts of people represented in these Socratic dialogues and so you know we get to try out a number of different way of looking at the world and they they come into conflict and conversation with each other in Plato you will find some very central problems and questions and topics of philosophy being raised for example what is knowledge Plato sets the bar rather high but he is at least approaching the problem in a constructive way or who should run the political system or what are the virtues and what are the vices or how do we become good people these are all just a few of the many different philosophical topics that Plato is addressing all throw one more in there that I think is particularly important what our universals when we say that you know I'm a human being and you're a human being what's the human being mnestheus central problem that that Plato addresses in terms of what he calls the forms or ideas so there are central problems or issues or topics that you'll get introduced to in studying Plato his works are very challenging but they're also incredibly rich and rewarding and you can study them really the rest of your life if you wanted to so there's no sense in delaying why not just jump right in the other thing that I think is really great about Plato is if you're studying the Platonic dialogues you're going to be attending to assumptions that people are making and arguments and distinctions and getting introduced to concepts you're acquiring the toolkit that you'll need in order to do philosophy in relation to other people so these are all some great reasons for beginning with Plato as your beginning there are some very practical questions about texts that we should get out of the way the first thing that people want to know is which dialogues which works by Plato should I be reading first and you know they're the answer to that is you can really start anywhere you like you're not going to hurt yourself by beginning with the Republic or the symposium or even with the you know late work like the laws that said I think that there there are some dialogues that are easier for beginners to wrap their heads around and see where Plato's going and get some sense of you know what what the Platonic project as a whole is other people may may recommend different reading orders and that's perfectly fine I'm just going to give you the one that I particularly like and I will point out that it's not exactly the same as what I do in like my introduction of philosophy classes or foundations and philosophy when I'm teaching it in an academic institution but for self-study here's the order that I think is for many people going to be the most productive start with two dialogues one of them is really really short and a bit confusing but you can figure it out and it's called the ion and the other one is a bit longer there's a bit more going on in there also probably going to be confusing at first but you'll puzzle it out and that is called the Meno why do I pick these two dialogues well they're both fairly you know early and they are part of a chronology where you get to see things happening with Socrates the Meno is a later dialogue as far as its composition but but it fits into this nice narrative that we we see going on and they both deal with a fundamental set of questions who actually knows what the hell they're talking about who has knowledge a Piston may in in Greek and the answer isn't made completely clear but at least we get to take some people off the stage and say well these people don't know they're talking about in the ion which is the shortest of the dialogues Socrates is talking with a guy named ion which is why it's called the ion and ion as a rap so Dee is explaining what it is that he does which is to go around and interpret Homer's poetry and Socrates acts asks them some pointed questions and it turns out that what ion does he's doing not by knowledge but by something like divine enthusiasm or a communication of the motion so there's some really interesting stuff going on there the Meno which is a little bit longer named after another guy Meno a friend of Socrates involves a lot of discussion about the nature of virtue and whether virtue is something that can be taught can we define virtue it turns out in that dialogue they're not able to come to a definition but eventually in other dialogues they do and these are really great starting points in it you also see foreshadowing of Socrates trial and death because there's a guy who shows up Anytus and he and Socrates get into a little bit of a tiff with each other after you've read those dialogues and not you know when I say read them I don't mean reading them once I mean reading them through a number of times and studying them and mulling them over then I would say you're ready to move on to a new sequence of dialogues and and there I would begin with a set that you can often find in in the last days of Socrates those would be the Euthyphro the apology the credo and the Phaedo why are all these associated with each other because they have to do with Socrates trial and his condemnation and his eventual execution the Euthyphro deals with the question of what piety is because Socrates is being accused of impiety and the apology is his defense speech which doesn't defend him all that well but lays out a lot of the doctrines and again explores issues of knowledge and who has it and who doesn't why Socrates is a wise person even though he doesn't know very much and some of Socrates views on death and then the credo Oh has to do with whether he should take the opportunity to slip away from the prison cell that that he is awaiting his execution in because his friend credo bribed the jailers or whether it be wrong to do so finally the Phaedo is a really long and great dialogue introduces a lot of platonic concepts and picks the death of Socrates in the day that he died he was having conversations with his friends about the immortality of the soul and arguments for it and against it and then the nature of philosophy in the relation between the soul and the body so those those are those six dialogues great starting point now where do you go after that well you have a lot of different options if you're particularly interested in the question of language and rhetoric you might read the gorgeous and the Protagoras and other dialogues like the cratylus if you want to dive right into the Republic which is one of the longest and in some respects best works of Plato there's nothing to prevent you from doing that you might also go another route and look at the dialogues on friendship and love which would be the licious the symposium which is one of the finest works of Western literature and the Phaedrus it doesn't really matter I think too much which order you read them in people get very worked up about there's got to be in the right order you're not going to hurt yourself by reading books out of order because you have to remember you're going to go back and reread these over and over and over again so don't get too preoccupied with that there's you know it really depends on what you're particularly interested in then we can think about questions of what book should I actually get you know let's get down to the nitty-gritty do I get this translation or this translation or this translation and again people get very concerned about having the right version there is no right version I'll tell you as somebody who's engaged in a lot of translation work you're never truly happy as a translator with the translation that you make of things from one language to another and you know you you can find translations that are good in one respect but not good at another you're almost better off actually comparing them with each other if you if you can't read it in the original Greek and plato's Greek by the way is quite hard it's demanding you don't have to be overly concerned about it what you really want to do is make sure that you have access to multiple versions and that you can find a translation that's readable for you now one of the things that I do recommend is getting an anthology and I have an older anthology here which is edited by Edith Hamilton and hunting and Karen's this was sort of the standard version back when I was in graduate school it's got most of Plato's dialogues certainly all the ones that are actually attributed to him and even some dialogues that we think you know might not actually be by Plato you know you can notice it's then quite you know footnoted for not footnoted but post-it noted for for me because I used this quite a lot and it gets a you know it's this sort of thin paper that you see in big thick books this is not a bad version to have there is a more recent set of translations that you can also get an anthology form edited by if I remember right Cooper and anise and I'll put links to both of those in the video below again don't get too preoccupied about having the right text it's important just to get get your hands on some Plato and you know you don't necessarily have to buy it you can find Plato at your local library very very commonly right you might even find an anthology like this you can also find Plato online there are a lot of platonic texts available in a variety of different translations and sources there's even something that's called the Perseus project that will allow you to you know if you want to look at the Greek you could you can do that in the the Perseus project website which is uh hosted by Tufts University so you don't have to worry too much about which translations or which additions the key thing is to get yourself something that works for you people are also quite concerned very typically with secondary literature and and I think a lot of this comes out of the feeling that I don't know if I'm really up to reading Plato you know it's it's challenging work he's got such a great reputation Who am I to approach Plato and make make sense of it I don't know that I'll actually get that much out of it maybe I should read an intro to philosophy or it was a history of philosophy or something like that and and if you want to do that there's there's nothing wrong with that I always tell people including my face-to-face students and online students that with the right resources with the right support anybody can study philosophy but if you want secondary literature there's certainly plenty of it out there I actually picked out a few things off of my bookshelf two very different writers and approaches like here's Gregory Voss doses Socrates ironist and moral philosopher Vlasto sysm is an academic and he takes a very analytic approach to Socrates and to Plato and I don't agree entirely with everything that he has to say but I do respect him as a author and I think he's worth reading that said something like this is gonna be written in a rather you know it's for an academic audience it's written at a high level you'll find things referenced here may not actually help you understand what what Plato and Socrates are up to Stanley Rosen kind of a similar thing here's his excellent commentary on Plato's symposium way longer than Plato's book of course because he's growing into great detail about it Rosen is much more historically oriented see if you read this you'll get a lot of background on you know what the references are and who he's talking about Rosen also likes to throw a lot of his own spin in there too and that's one of the things that secondary literature you're not gonna find histories of philosophy that don't have a certain bent or sometimes even bias aiming at a certain way of understanding the material emphasizing some things de-emphasizing other things so you know it's good to read secondary literature but you should realize that you're relying on somebody else to tell you what to think and so you want to approach it with that proverbial grain of salt don't you one of the people who I particularly like I'm gesturing over that way because he's on my bookshelf over there is Friedrich cobblestone I'll put a link to his history of philosophy that was sort of a standard reference guide for us back in graduate school again written at a fairly academic level but you know cobblestone at least won't steer you wrong sometimes he can be a little dry and dull but he's reliable as opposed to say you know Bertrand Russell I wouldn't recommend his history of philosophy for understanding Plato or you know are there other people who reference him as well you could go to popular literature like in a play too at the Google plaques or things like that but yeah that's dicey you know you never know if you're getting the straight stuff the only way to tell if the person really does understand Plato is for you to read Plato so why not cut out the middle person and go directly to the text itself then then go to the secondary literature and see if that helps you if you really really want secondary literature again I recommend going to your local library particularly if you are able to access a university library and seeing what the secondary literature is you'll find it in the same shelf area as Plato's own own writings or if you want to find texts online one of the things that you can do let's go to Google Scholar you have to actually type it in Google Scholar and then you can find PDFs of whatever is available academic articles on on Plato as well as all sorts of other things another good website for that is academia.edu we're academics tend to upload their their publications so you can find a lot of stuff for free that way so you know those are I think the the things that people need to know the most about the practical questions which dialog should I read first what order you know what editions what translations and what about secondary literature now we get to a part of this that I'm actually much more interested in and passionate about and that's advice about how to start you've got yourself a platonic dialogue you're gonna read it you're gonna reread it because you're gonna get confused as health first time around unless you're very unusual what are some suggestions for how to approach it how to get the most out of it so right off the bat the first thing I have to say is when you're reading philosophy and this doesn't just go for Plato this goes for any great philosopher do not expect that you're gonna read it the first time and you're gonna get everything out of it it just does not work that way as a matter of fact what makes these text classics is the fact that they are so rich that you can go to them over and over and over again in the course of decades and still find other stuff that you might have missed or not paid attention to or downplayed and you get a better and better picture as you do it so the first reading you might not even understand half of what you're reading that's okay don't don't put so much stress on yourself that you have to grasp everything when you're reading it you know I would say give it a good you know once-over read it all the way through don't worry about the stuff that you're not understanding then go back and then start you know maybe taking notes or worrying about what's going on in this passage you should also try to suspend whatever assumptions you have about what philosophy is or anything you've already learned about Plato or Socrates it doesn't mean you have to throw it away but just like you know realize that you could have gotten missing information or you could be off base about it or perhaps you misheard or misread something it's also helpful not to come in with a lot of assumptions about what philosophy is or how it has to be done plato was one of the people who's doing philosophy long before any of us come on the scene and before any of the other people who decide how philosophy has to be done are arriving oftentimes you know taking him into account another thing is that Plato is writing dialogues and I'm going to talk in a few minutes about what a dialogue requires of you as the reader so you want to realize that there is something systemic something valuable something intellectual something developmental going on in each of the dialogues if you don't get it right off the bat that's okay it's there and the more that you work at it the better you're going to understand what's happening there it's not going to be presented to you in a systematic form the way it would be in a textbook these are not intro to philosophy textbooks these dialogues they're not philosophical treatises they are actual dialogues between characters who discuss ideas and sometimes get into actual arguments with each other and go back and forth and don't always finish all of their thoughts so pay attention to what's going on realize that you are gradually building a map of what's happening in the dialogue and it's a map of what's there but it's not going to be all there on the surface and the organization is not going to be totally apparent to you the other thing I want to say is have some faith have some faith or hope or confidence whatever it is that you want to call it have some of that in two things one is in the text people wouldn't have been reading this for years and years and years and you know saving Plato most of ancient literature we've lost we have Plato and people wouldn't be going back to this over and over and over again if there wasn't something valuable there maybe you don't get it the first time maybe you don't get it the tenth time but it's there so have some some confidence that if you put the work in you will get something out of it put some confidence in yourself I think that every person is capable of reading works of philosophy and getting something out of it not only will will get the same thing at every every given time but everyone is able to get something out of studying philosophy and you're no exception with the right support with the right advice with the right application you can make a lot of progress even without an academic advisor or classroom setting you can study Plato on your own and come to understand a lot of it the last thing that I want to stress is that what's really core at the beginning is not developing a sense of whether you agree or disagree with Plato that happens later what's more important is understanding understanding is the ground you know or foundation after which that's been laid you can decide whether you appreciate what's going on or whether you agree with it but if you don't understand it you have no idea what you're disagreeing with if you disagree with it if you don't understand it and you say oh I love Plato he's so wonderful you don't actually know what you're you're appreciating the key is to develop a solid understanding of what it is that Plato is actually telling us so those are some some tips that I think could be quite helpful for you I do also have a few things to say specifically about the dialog form and what it offers to you and what it requires of you as a reader and the first thing is don't expect a dialogue to be something different than a dialog I already talked about this a bit these are not systematic treatises even though they have a systematic structure to them they are dialogues they are conversations between people they contain some parts that might be very systematic for example in the Republic but a lot of the time the conversation is is going back and forth and meandering from point to point you have to be the one who does the work to put these things together so you actually have to follow the dialogue that means that one of the key things that you have to be able to do is figure out who is saying what at what point depending on the translation that you have and which text we're talking about you can sometimes lose the threat of that you might want to do what they do in plays right and put you know s for Socrates and G for gorgeous or M Firmino or whatever right next to those people that's fine you can deface your books however you like if it helps you out the dialogue form requires you to distinguish between the different speakers and the different speakers on a platonic dialogue are different precisely because they represent different points of view they're not just a bunch of people who are all on the same page you know there are some places where Socrates is talking with Glaucon and Glaucon is Socrates will say this and this and this and then Walken says oh yes Socrates I see that now and there's some of that but there's a lot of well here's what I think well here's what I see wrong with what you think oh really but what about this oh yeah I get that you have to be able to distinguish these two speakers or three speakers or five speakers apart from each other so you're not confusing them with each other in many of the dialogues the person who is representing Plato's point of view is Socrates but there are even a few dialogues where Socrates is the one who's listening to somebody else explaining things so you want to be able to differentiate between the different points of view and the different voices that are involved just like you would with a Shakespeare play right or a more modern play Eugene O'Neill or pick whoever you like the different voices are coming from different people who have different points of view and think about the world in very different ways you also want to pay attention to who these characters are that is why somebody again like if you're doing the symposium maybe reading Rosen could be quite helpful play-doh is drawing most of his characters from people that actually lived in ancient Athens or in other environment owns like Mino is an out-of-towner for example right as is credo so it's it's important to know enough about these people that you can make sense of them but you should also realize that you know Plato is also sometimes putting his own spin on things he's a creative writer he is not just a philosopher he's also a poet he's also a dramatist and the characters are representing sometimes types of people so through Symmachus in the Republic represents the type of the brash sophist the person who comes in and has all the answers and wants everyone to shut up so he can he can tell his story right now you've seen that sort of type before I think right and Glaucon is the the sort of person who's a young person he thinks that Socrates has something to tell him he's gonna squeeze Socrates until he gets the doctrines out of it and he's even gonna play devil's advocate so it's important to attend to the characters another thing it's the thing about is the the the dialogues often have a dramatic setting and you don't have to you know necessarily think that the setting determines everything but it is worth paying attention to the arguments that are contained within the dialogues and philosophy is in very much respect about arguments the arguments are what we could call occasioned they don't just get made out of the blue or because somebody wants to write something down they're being made people at a given point in time and the argument will kind of meander around and sometimes they'll lose the thread and they left to come back to it they're not being entirely systematically worked out but they are being developed to some degree this requires something from you as a reader you have to correlate things especially when you're reading across different dialogues you're gonna say oh I saw that sort of thing being referenced back in the Phaedo this is why it's nice to have an anthology because you can have all the books in one place it could be like oh you know this is about courage didn't I remember reading about courage back and in this work here What did he say about that so you have to do some sort of cross checking in some comparison and putting the pieces together that's important for you as a reader now you don't have to do it all at once that's the good news right read one text at a time but keep in mind that you're gonna find the same issues being looked at from different sides in the Platonic dialogues the last thing I want to say about it is Socrates as Plato's mouthpiece well sometimes make some really bad arguments is that because Plato is this you know just stupid and didn't know any better no I think that the reason why we see Socrates sometimes making bad arguments is because you have to look at who he's speaking to he's speaking to somebody who himself generally there's only a few female characters can't recognize a good argument when it's being made or isn't able to to really question the the grounds that Socrates is going at but you as the reader can these these dialogues when Plato is making a bad argument he's expecting you to get into the conversation and say wait a second Socrates what about this that's what makes these dialogues particularly rich and productive they can suck you as the reader into them so that's some some tips that you could say stem from the nature of the die log form there are a few concerns that that people often bring up that I would like to say a little bit about because I want to not necessarily dismiss them but at least make them not so pressing for you if you're the kind of person who gets really concerned about this and and I really have four main ones to bring up although there there could be some others as well so the first of these is what we call the Socratic problem Plato uses Socrates as a character in his dialogues we think and when I say we I mean the people who study Plato professionally we think that that some of the dialogues do represent Socrates as he really was they are probably things that Socrates was saying and then we think that some other dialogues Socrates is just being used as a mouthpiece and Plato is attributing to Socrates and having him say things that Socrates himself probably didn't think or even think of and then there's some stuff in the middle and the question is well how do you draw the line and the answer is nobody actually has a cut-and-dried way of doing this that everybody agrees with there is some agreement that that like for example the apology that probably represents Socrates a lot of the early dialogues and we're gonna talk about that early middle a problem in just a second those are probably Socratic as well some things you know much later probably not you know most scholars tend to think today that the doctrine of forms the way that Plato articulates that that that probably is not platonic although you know Aristotle certainly seem to think that that it was at least in some respects but you know we don't really know so that that's one thing the question to ask yourself is can you read Plato's dialogues and understand what is being articulated without having to know did Socrates himself say this historically and the answer is yes whether he did say it or didn't say it it's a it's a work of literature it's a work of philosophy if it helps you - instead of calling them Socrates call him you know jimJam from Planet booboo or something like that do that and that'll help you not get so worked up about did Socrates actually say this that's a separate problem that we we don't necessarily need to worry about when we're figuring out what did Plato actually you know think and what is he trying to get across in these dialogues could be that Socrates didn't say anything about the forms and maybe the doctor of the forms actually is right we're more interested in to the doctrines themselves make sense now the second thing is this early middle late and you'll see this being referred to in the secondary literature on Plato you know that this dialogue is obviously a late dialogue or this dialogue is an early one or this one is a middle one and then they'll even break it into like early middle late middle you know and there are some really cool theories out there about that some of them are based on things like the stylo metrics of it others are based on you know what what ideas are showing up or when the dot the dialogue is supposed to be said or the degree of sophistication of it when it comes down to it and this is something that I devoted quite a bit of study to back when I was in graduate school nobody really knows I mean we we can guess that well the Republic was probably written later than the apology and a lot of the stuff in the Republic is not coming directly from Socrates himself but we don't actually know and and the scholars who put forth theories they often are relying on rather circular arguments in order to make this work do you yourself need to decide any of these things in order to read understand appreciate and decide whether you agree with Plato or not no you don't need to worry about that if you want to worry about it you certainly can a third issue that comes up particularly in terms of the symposium but also some of the other dialogues is about different ideas about gender and homosexuality and particularly male male relations some people get quite turned off by that you know finding out that the symposium for example is a set of speeches about love in which male male relationships are featured quite heavily and the characters themselves within the story are in fact lovers of each other keep in mind that platonic love is not physical and so Plato himself and Socrates also as a character are not actually endorsing you know these these very physical male male relationships often with incredible power differentials you know that is part of the story but it's a lot more complicated than people might present the last thing that I think people often get really hung up on it has to do with the Republic is the Republic's supposed to be a blueprint for Plato's ideal Society or is this a sort of ironic gesture that goes on for pages and pages that Socrates is making the slimming we used to criticize our existing you know polities and governments and those of ancient cities again we don't really know there are theories about this you don't have to stake out a position in order to be able to appreciate the Republic the first thing is to actually read it and then to understand it and then worry about whether it could be realized and in real life and whether that would be a good thing or not so those are some possible roadblocks or obstacles that I just want to say you know we can register them but you can steer around them you don't have to make them central to yourself the last things that I'm going to say just to wrap this up because this is already becoming quite an extensive discussion is there's a few other issues that people might bring up one of them is people ask what what pace should I be reading these dialogues at and my answer to that is well it depends on you it depends on the person the key thing is that you understand what you're reading and you don't try to rush it you can't blaze your way through and speed read philosophy you're just not gonna get that much out of it and a text that you know I can read now I'm not going to read any Plato for the first time because I've already read all of Plato but something that I reread and get something out of in the space of an afternoon it might take you a day it might take you a week but that's because we're different people and I've got more experience in reading this so I can see the connections more easily and it's perfectly fine you can take whatever time you want as a matter of fact I strongly suggest doing that another question people ask is well how can I tell when I'm done reading the text well how can I tell I put it in enough work some people are you know questioning well do I have to master the text no absolutely not that you know just think about this if you wanted to read your way through Plato and just read half of his dialogues this is a lot you know we're talking about like 700 pages or so of material to work your way through you don't need to master anything you just need to keep making improvement and you don't even have to like only read Plato until you finish reading Plato you know before you go on to Aristotle or Nietzsche whoever it's up to you you're the reader you're the one who's that if it's your education you're the one who gets to decide feel empowered the last thing that I'll say is I have been developing resources to help people understand and and you know work their way through platonic texts for a lot of time and some of these are you know things I produced for my own students and classes you know the lecture videos handouts recently podcast stuff I don't have available right now but I will be in the near future having some online courses that will be available some of them free and some of them very very inexpensively if you want to work your way through platonic dialogues they will be available in the study with Sadler Academy online there's lots and lots and lots of other great resources out there that you can access for free or you can pay for as well tons of courses I'm just mentioning that I'll have my own in case you know that's that's something that appeals to you but there's lots of other great stuff available as well you should avail yourself of those those resources if it helps your study great if it supports it that's great if you can do it on your own now that you've you know been fortified with a little bit of encouragement and you can work your way through it more power to you the key thing is to read Plato and just keep working at it and develop a systematic sense of what's going on in those texts and where Plato fits into the history of philosophy and if you do that I promise you it will be rewarding the last thing I'll say every one of you are up to the task of reading Plato so just dive in don't don't you know hesitate don't put it off till next weekend don't put it off till next semester next year just get into it start studying him and or if you have already spent studying Plato read some more and you'll find yourself learning so much in the process you

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 17,474

Rating: 4.978261 out of 5

Keywords: Lecture, Lesson, Talk, Education, Sadler, Philosophy, Learning, Reason

Id: X72ELQFnjYU

Length: 47min 46sec (2866 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 13 2019