Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here all of Western philosophy, said the British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead is quote a series of footnotes to Plato. This Greek philosopher, who started as a young devotee of Socrates, laid the groundwork for more
than two millennia philosophical thought. Plato's dialogues, including Republic, are required reading for every serious student of philosophy, and his academy in Athens set the model for the modern university. So who was this guy? Plato of Colitis was born around four hundred and twenty eight b c. In the
waning days of the Golden Age of Athens. He met Socrates as a young man and was a close follower of this provocative street philosopher who confounded politicians and prostitutes alike with his unrelenting questions, now known as the Socratic method. Plato was a owned twenty years old when Athens lost the disastrous Peloponnesian War to its rival Sparta. He served
briefly in the war. After considering a career in politics, Plato grew Disenchanted by corrupt leaders and the tragic execution of Socrates, his hero and mentor, Plato came to believe that only right philosophy could end human suffering and ensure justice. Plato turned his energies to education, studying Pythagorean mathematics and traveling through Sicily, Italy, and Egypt. In his early thirties, he returned to Athens and founded his academy in an
open air grove open to men and women. It drew the best and brightest from the Greek speaking world to learn mathematics and natural philosophy. Aristotle came there when he was seventeen and stayed on to teach. The academy continued for almost two centuries after Plato's death, closing in seventy b c. E. Plato never married or had any children. He died in his early eighties, but lives on in his captivating prose and thought promo questions recorded in thirty
lively and challenging dialogues. Reading one of Plato's dialogues is like eavesdropping on a fascinating, rambling conversation. The dialogues are constructed like intellectual dramas, with Socrates often playing the main character in them. Socrates teasingly interrogates applies answers out of his fellow Athenians, revealing the allusiveness of simple truths. Plato's early dialogues are heavily indebted to Socrates, who left no writing of his own, but Plato's own ideas emerge in
middle and later works. Like Socrates, though, Plato doesn't beat the reader over the head with his philosophy, but prefers an indirect approach that tasks the reader with drawing their own conclusions. We spoke with Eric Brown, a philosophy professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He explained, in his dialogues, Plato doesn't say, here are the answers and here are the reasons, except them on my authority. Plato wants to inspire people to do philosophy fee and think it through
for themselves. The dialogues do that. They leave a lot of open questions. They don't settle everything. I think that's one of the reasons why Plato has found so many readers over the centuries. He leaves a lot of the work for the reader to do, which maybe we find inspiring. If Plato could be said to have a central doctrine. It's the concept of forms, the idea that the world we perceive with our physical senses is flawed, but there also exists a separate world of perfect, eternal forms beyond
our perception. Those perfect forms are abstract ideals like beauty, equality, goodness, being, and knowledge. This core philosophy is called Platonism, and philosophers who have ascribed to it over the millennia are known as Platonists. Brown said Platonism is the idea that there are truths, causes, or principles that are abstract and not available to sense perception, but only to thought, and that when we access these were in a better position to understand the way the world is and in a better
position to live a good life. Two of the most popular dialogues are Symposium and Feto. Symposium discusses love, including what's come to be known as platonic love, a term Plato never used and which is far more nuanced than simply a non sexual relationship. A Plato distinguishes between divine eros and vulgar eros. A divine eros is a love that goes beyond physical attraction, which is vulgar eros to supreme beauty or makes one think of spiritual things. Meanwhile,
Feto explores the nature of the soul. However, the most read of Plato's works is Republic. Brown said, it covers so much ground. You get a little of Plato's thinking about politics, a little bit about the soul, about what it is to live a good life, what it is to understand the world, how it is to teach, and what teaching really is. In Republic, Plato puts forward a number of bold posals, including the claims the ideal city would be ruled by a class of virtuous male and
female philosopher kings. Brown thinks that Plato is clearly trying to push his reader's philosophical buttons. He said Republic was plainly written to be provocative. The idea that no city is well governed unless it's ruled by a philosopher, it's nutty. One of the most vivid and enduring passages in Republic is socrates extended Allegory of the Cave. In the allegory, a group of captives are chained up inside a dark
cave lit only by faint firelight. Their only knowledge of the outside world are the shadows that play on the cave walls and garbled bits of echoed conversation. One of the captives manages to escape and discovers there's an entire reality outside of the cave. The brightness of the sun burns his eyes, but the pain is worth knowing the truth. When he returns to the cave and offers to free his fellow captives, they mock his interpretations of their beloved
shadows and decide to kill him. Here again, Plato is returning to his notion of truth existing outside of our limited perception. Brown believes that the cave allegory is specifically talking about the true nature and function of education. Brown said, real education is not being filled with information, it's a
transformation of your soul, a reorientation of your values. For Plato, when you stop taking the world as it seems to you, and when you stop believing other people's opinions on what's valuable and you start searching for what's beyond those mere appearances,
that's when you're being educated. Brown teaches Plato every semester at Washington University and says that students continue to have their minds opened by Plato's dialogues, which challenge readers to wrestle with some of the biggest questions, how to know and how to live. Brown said, he asks questions that are still worth asking, and he asks them in an engaging and provocative way. That's still one of the best literary representations of how to do philosophy or how to
get into doing philosophy. For those two reasons, he will always matter. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clay. For more on this and lots of other curious topics, is it how stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of iHeart Radio. More podcasts on my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.