theme
The classical inquiry into excellence of character — what it is, how it is acquired, and how it shapes a life.
theme
Plato's account of justice as the right ordering of the soul and the city — each part doing its own work — developed across the Republic against the sophistic claim that justice is merely the interest of the stronger.
theme
Plato's conviction that education is the turning of the soul toward the good — not the pouring of information into an empty vessel but the reorientation of the whole person, the central task of the city and the meaning of the cave.
theme
Plato's most famous and most contested political proposal — that cities will have no rest from evils until philosophers rule or rulers philosophize — and the long argument it began about whether wisdom can or should govern.
theme
Plato's quarrel with rhetoric — the art of persuasion that the sophists taught and sold — and his charge that it flatters rather than instructs, producing conviction without knowledge, the manipulation of the soul against the truth.
philosopher
Athenian philosopher, founder of the Academy, and author of the dialogues that organise the philosophical tradition around the question of the well-ordered soul and the well-ordered city.
book
Plato's account of Socrates' defence speech at his trial in 399 BCE — the founding document of philosophy as a way of life, in which Socrates refuses to abandon the examined life even to save it, and the conflict of philosophy and the city is laid bare.
book
Aristotle's short treatise on the ten basic kinds of being and the foundation of his logic — the opening work of the Organon, and one of the most influential and most studied texts in the history of philosophy.
book
Plato's confrontation between philosophy and rhetoric — and between two ways of life — in which Socrates argues, against the orator Gorgias and the ruthless Callicles, that it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and that the good life is the just one.
book
Plato's dialogue on whether virtue can be taught — which turns into a profound inquiry into the nature of knowledge itself, introducing the theory that learning is recollection and the famous demonstration with the slave boy.
book
Aristotle's inquiry into being as such — the nature of substance, cause and the divine unmoved mover — the founding work of metaphysics as a discipline and one of the most influential philosophical texts ever written.
book
Plato's dialogue on the last day of Socrates' life — his serene conversation about death, the arguments for the immortality of the soul, and the theory of Forms — closing with one of the most moving death scenes in literature.
book
Plato's dialogue on the nature of love — a sequence of speeches at a drinking party culminating in Socrates' account, learned from Diotima, of love as the soul's ascent from beautiful bodies to the eternal Form of Beauty itself.
book
Plato's account of the creation of the cosmos by a divine craftsman who shapes the world on the model of the eternal Forms — the most influential of his dialogues in the Middle Ages, and the foundation of the long tradition of the rationally ordered universe.
theme
Plato's conviction, argued most fully in the Phaedo, that the soul is immortal and separable from the body — the metaphysical foundation of his ethics and the doctrine that shaped the Western religious imagination for two thousand years.
theme
Aristotle's approach to morality through character rather than rules — the claim that the good life consists in the exercise of virtue, that virtue is a settled disposition formed by habit, and that ethics is the cultivation of the right kind of person.
comparison
Two foundational philosophers, one Academy, and two different but deeply related answers to the question of how to read the world.
comparison
The teacher who wrote nothing and the pupil who wrote everything through him — and the deep question of where the questioning, ignorance-professing Socrates ends and the system-building Plato begins.
essay
An interpretive reading of Plato's influence on the whole course of Western civilization — through later Platonism, Christianity, the medieval and Renaissance worlds, and the foundations of modern thought.
essay
An interpretive reading of Plato's philosophy of education — education as the turning of the soul, the role of the Academy, and the conviction that the formation of citizens is the central task of the just city.
essay
An interpretive reading of Plato's opposition to the sophists — the conflict between philosophy and rhetoric, truth and persuasion, and the question of whether morality is real or merely a human convention.
essay
An interpretive reading of how Socrates lives in Plato's dialogues — the Socratic method and ethics of the early dialogues, and the question of where the historical Socrates ends and Plato's own philosophy begins.
essay
An interpretive reading of the philosopher-king ideal — the argument for the rule of wisdom, the objections it provokes, and Plato's own movement from the ideal ruler to the rule of law.
essay
An interpretive argument for Plato's continuing centrality — why the questions he framed about justice, knowledge, the soul and the best political order remain the permanent questions of philosophy.