Rebecca Goldstein Quotes About Plato
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Plato's concern is not just an intellectual issue, but it is knitted with emotional life as well.
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Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for which, in philosophy, there is no substitute.
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Plato conceived of philosophy as necessarily gregarious rather than solitary. The exposure of presumptions is best done in company, the more argumentative the better.
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So Socrates was a kind of gadfly. He was a sort of philosophical urban gorilla hanging around in the middle of Athens, asking these peculiar questions of everybody - important people, young men, slaves - questions that had to do with ultimately what's the life that's worth living. And Plato was one of the young men who hung around him, a very aristocratic young man, came from a very old, important family.
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Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.
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Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: "Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better."
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And what is it, according to Plato, that philosophy is supposed to do? Nothing less than to render violence to our sense of ourselves and our world, our sense of ourselves in the world.
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