Gorgias (Penguin Classics)

I was very disappointed with the product. It was described as "Used, Very Good" with no marking or writing inside. Today I received a book that was stained and marked with pencil, pen, and highlighter. The outside cover had been folded at least a few times and a large piece of tape was barely holding the back cover together. Overall, I was very disappointed.

Originally my order was slow in shipping, but this seller gave me a partial refund quickly. Seems like slow shipping is a rare case with this seller. I will definitely buy from this seller again because of their honesty and fairness.

This reading for me was brutal. It was a requieres reading for a class and reminded me of how much I dislike philosophy. Either way, the vulgarity reflects that of which the Apostle Paul speaks on in Romans 1.

Classic Novel. My professor pointed out Plato's skill of creating different voices for each character...something not many authors can do. In fact, it is said he was able to capture the communicative style of each individuals real persona.

The Gorgias is a necessary dialogue to understand Plato as well as an artistic and philosophic masterpiece.

Following the collapse of democratic Athenian civilization after their defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, many thinkers opined on what went wrong and how Athens should be rebuilt.

In the Gorgias, Plato begins his effort at this by criticizing the traditional education of a gentleman in oratory, or the persuasion of crowds needed in direct democracy. Instead, Plato proposes that the young should be trained in virtue, which given the knowledge is equal to virtue doctrine of Socrates, is a result gained by education.

As one continues to read the Gorgias, one sees the defeat of oratory by dialectical arguments, the victory of Socrates over the leading Sophists and orators of his day and the establishment that the true good for man is not pleasure but virtue.

In other words, Plato is arguing that the execution of Socrates was a disaster—not for Socrates—but for Athens. The renewal of Athenian society should be founded on the Socratic project of virtue and dialectic instead of power and oratory.

This even gets expressed in the penultimate pages of the discussion where Socrates criticizes Athenian statesmen like Pericles and declares that the true statesman is yet to be found.

That this is all done in a dialogue by dialectic makes Plato an artistic and philosophic genius. The literary form of the philosophy and the philosophy itself parallel and complement one another to express the philosophy in such a way that it is difficult to summarize the Gorgias without reading it for oneself.

The good life, the proper form for inquiry, the foundations of the good society... all this and more is powerfully argued in the Gorgias with Plato articulating a complete and powerful vision. Essential reading for philosophers and even just for those who are interested in such philosophic questions.

Like all Waterfield's translations of Plato, this translation of the Symposium is clear and written with good style. In most of Plato's dialogues, Socrates talks with an interlocutor about the some concept, say courage (Laches), and shows by questioning that the interlocutor cannot say precisely what the concept is. Here, rather than Socratic questioning most of the dialogue is speeches about love, which fits Socrates' programme of defining things (what is love?). In Socrates' speech about love (which he claims to be due to Diotima) he speaks in 210-211 about Beauty itself: "Then again, he won't perceive beauty as a face or hands or any other physical feature, or as a piece of reasoning or knowledge, and he won't perceive it as being anywhere else either -- in something like a creature or the earth or the heavens. No, he'll perceive it in itself and by itself, constant and eternal, and he'll see that every other beautiful object somehow partakes of it, but in such a way that their coming to be and ceasing to be don't increase or diminish it at all, and it remains entirely unaffected."

The Symposium is not representative of the format of Plato's dialogues, and thus this shouldn't be the first dialogue you read, especially because this dialogue describes Socrates' life in Alcibiades' speech, and if you don't already know Socrates from other dialogues you won't care as much as you should about his character. (On the other hand, there is no reason to wait to read this fun dialogue until after the Republic or even heavier works like the Parmenides, Timaeus, Laws.)

The Gorgias doesn't have anything to say about the Forms or epistemology or about how to run society. Rather, Socrates tells us how he thinks one should live. He does not convincingly prove that what he says is correct, because at some point one must say they merely believe that something is right (e.g., you have a deep feeling that learning or self-mastery are things you want to have). By analogy, we must have a feeling for what some words mean and then we can define other words using these, and we must declare some statements in mathematics to be axioms that we then use to prove other statements. If someone says that they have a deep feeling that eating cheese is how they want to flourish, this cannot be proved wrong.

From my reading, Socrates declares that the most valuable things for a person are to have an orderly mind and self-control, to be intellectually honest, and to value hard won expertise. Not everything we do needs to be directly connected to these goals, but we should value other things only as they help move us towards these goals. Thus, being able to convince other people to do things may be helpful if we want to help people improve themselves, but convincing people is not an admirable skill in and of itself, and likewise for becoming wealthy and respected through business. When Socrates says that he is the only statesman in Athens, he means that he is the only person who regularly tries to improve the souls of other people, rather than merely being in charge of running a city, repairing streets, and fighting battles.

A good example of the way of thinking about the world that Socrates says to be wrong is the following statement by Callicles (484c-d) (by philosophy think abstract learning, not merely what one does in a philosophy department today): "The point is, Socrates, it's fine for a person to dabble in philosophy when he's the right age for it, but it ruins him if he devotes too much of his life to it. Even a naturally gifted person who continues to study philosophy far into life is bound to end up without the experience to have gained the accomplishments he ought to have if he's to be a gentleman with some standing in society."

Plato is an important teacher of mine; he understood the knowledge of our immortal soul twenty-five hundred years ago. One sultry night in ancient Greece, Socrates and five other philosophers join together, and the Symposium is created. Plato, a student of Socrates, writes down the dialogue in which these enormous thinkers are engaged. This great literary work about love has survived the ages. These amazing men of thought gave us wisdom about two types of love: common love and celestial love. To understand common love is very simple: it is found in our everyday relationships. Celestial love is an extraordinary bond, the aim of which is to connect our gift from the Divine with another person.

“As we all know, love and Aphrodite are inseparable. The duality of Aphrodite is undeniable: One Aphrodite, the one we call celestial is older. The other, the younger one is called common.”-Excerpt from Symposium

In other words, the bond between companion soul mates is an infinite connection as opposed to the self-interests between personalities. The one called common has to do with our personality and survival needs. The one called celestial has to do with the spiritual soul.

The common relationship will just satisfy our survival needs, karmic obstacles will infuse chaos and the soul is unconscious to the parties involved. Celestial Aphrodite pushes you to journey deep within. She will coax you, to discover your own soul and prove to yourself that you are worthy of an exalted bond. Plato should be an important teacher for anyone interested in a Soul Mate connection!

Serena Jade, writer at Serena Jade Publishing: “Where Psychology, Spirituality and Philosophy of Physics Meet."

This translation was the first one I ever read, and at the time it really impressed me. But compare for yourself. In the translations below Plato is talking about the God of Love (193b):

1871 Jowett: If we are friends of the God and at peace with him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world at present.
1952 Hamilton: If we are his friends and make our peace with him, we shall succeed, as few at present succeed, in finding the person to love who in the strictest sense belongs to us.
1999 Gill: If we are friends of the god and have him on our side, we shall do what few people now do - find and become close to the loved ones that are really our own.

Here is my favorite translation of 193c, one of the most interesting passages:
"We human beings will never attain happiness unless we find perfect love, unless we each come across the love of our lives and thereby recover our original nature."
--- translated by Robin Waterfield

I'm not a philosophy or ancient history student, I picked up Plato's "Symposium" to challenge myself and see if I could understand it. The "Symposium" is a gathering of Greek thinkers who sit around and give speeches about love.

Phaedrus talks about the greatness of love and how those who have it achieve great things. Pausanias talks of the merits of boy/man love where the boy pleasures the man while the man passes on his wisdom to the boy and that this is the best kind of love, not the lesser lover of procreation between man and woman. Eryximachus talks about how love is the source of all happiness. Aristophanes talks about how once upon a time there was no man or woman but a single human who had both sexes' characteristics. These creatures tried to scale the heavens and so Zeus cut them in half and ever since then man and woman have sought to create that single creature again. Socrates talks about his teacher Diotima and how she taught him that love was the only way human beings could be immortal.

"The Symposium" is a short read not to be rushed as there are some fascinating ideas here. Not new ones though but ones that have influenced western culture and thought for centuries. Aristophanes' and Diotima's especially are ideas I've come across before but didn't know they originated in this text. It's also very pro-pederasty which I thought was amusing and can see why some people might have thought Plato was a closet homosexual. Those Greeks certainly were liberated though.

It's an accesible and interesting little book though this Penguin Great Ideas edition features no notes, contextual history, introduction, glossary, reading list, etc which the Penguin Classics edition does so if you're studying this text I'd get that edition rather than this one.

Short and a relatively easy read (as far as ancient Greek philosophy goes), Plato's Symposium is the perfect way to become acquainted with Plato's philosophy and his Socratic dialogues. Contemporaries of Socrates explain and glorify the nature of love, with Socrates offering the final word. The Symposium offers some important descriptions of Socrates as a person, gives the reader a brief glimpse of Socrates' style of argumentation, lends insight to the cultural mores of Socrates' age and introduces Plato's doctrine of Forms. It will make you want to read the rest of Plato's works.

This is one of my favorite Socratic dialogues. The evidence suggests that Plato wrote it soon after the execution of Socrates, and while I would not say there is a bitter edge to this Gorgias dialogue, I can definitely say that the exchanges do get a little lively at times. At one point, I could almost hear the voices of Socrates and Polus being raised as they argued. Another positive aspect of this dialogue is the fact that it is comparatively easy to understand. Socrates does not start spouting ideas about true Forms or using geometry to prove his points; the more esoteric, more advanced Platonic ideas are to be found in Plato's later writings. In many ways, this dialogue also serves as an introduction to Plato's masterpiece The Republic. Socrates' ideas on some things seem nascent at this point, and he actually contradicts some points he would later make, but the heart of Socratic thought lies within easy grasp in the pages of this dialogue.
The dialogue begins as a discussion about the true nature of oratory. The famed orator Gorgias is in town, and Socrates is most anxious to have a discussion with him. At first, Gorgias' younger friend Polus desires to speak for Gorgias, but he proves little match for Socrates. When Gorgias enters the discussion, Socrates treats him very well, as a respectable man with whom he disagrees, and Gorgias for his part is never flustered by Socrates' description of his art as a knack and as a form of pandering. Later, Callicles bravely jumps into the mix, and things really get interesting. Socrates seemingly admires Callicles' courage to state what he means without shame, yet he winds up getting Callicles to agree with his points in the end. What is it all about? The main points that Socrates makes are that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, and that it is better for a man to be punished for his wrongs than to escape punishment. Implicit in his argument is the belief that all wrongdoing is the result of ignorance; following up on this idea, he declares that dictators and politicians who hold vast powers are the most miserable men of all. He goes so far as to describe Athenian heroes such as Pericles as bad men because the state was less healthy when they left office than when they took office, the proof being that such men eventually lost power and were even ostracized.
For Socrates, happiness comes from being virtuous and self-disciplined. The orator can make a great speech and convince his peers that he is right, but he does this by inculcating belief rather than knowledge in the minds of his audience; he requires no knowledge to win such a debate, and as a result he tells the people what he knows they want to hear rather than what is truly best for them. Right and wrong are immaterial to the orator, Socrates charges. Callicles urges Socrates to give up his immature fixation on philosophy and become a public speaker; were he to be brought to court and charged with a wrong, Callicles tells him that he would be unable to defend himself. Much of the concluding pages consist of a wonderful defense by Socrates of his way of life. He agrees that a court could rather easily try and execute him, but if that were to happen, only his accusers would suffer for it. His thoughts are for the next world, and he has no fear of death because he believes a man with a clean, healthy soul such as his will be given immediate access to the isles of the blessed. The execution of Socrates was clearly on Plato's mind as he wrote this particular discourse.
I would recommend this dialogue to individuals seeking an introduction to Plato's philosophy. The entire discussion is clear throughout and easily comprehensible, and it proves interesting to see how some of Plato's thoughts changed between the years separating this dialogue and The Republic.

Plato is an important teacher of mine; he understood the knowledge of our immortal soul twenty-five hundred years ago. One sultry night in ancient Greece, Socrates and five other philosophers join together, and the Symposium is created. Plato, a student of Socrates, writes down the dialogue in which these enormous thinkers are engaged. This great literary work about love has survived the ages. These amazing men of thought gave us wisdom about two types of love: common love and celestial love. To understand common love is very simple: it is found in our everyday relationships. Celestial love is an extraordinary bond, the aim of which is to connect our gift from the Divine with another person.

“As we all know, love and Aphrodite are inseparable. The duality of Aphrodite is undeniable: One Aphrodite, the one we call celestial is older. The other, the younger one is called common.”-Excerpt from Symposium

In other words, the bond between companion soul mates is an infinite connection as opposed to the self-interests between personalities. The one called common has to do with our personality and survival needs. The one called celestial has to do with the spiritual soul.

The common relationship will just satisfy our survival needs, karmic obstacles will infuse chaos and the soul is unconscious to the parties involved. Celestial Aphrodite pushes you to journey deep within. She will coax you, to discover your own soul and prove to yourself that you are worthy of an exalted bond. Plato should be an important teacher for anyone interested in a Soul Mate connection!

Serena Jade, writer at Serena Jade Publishing: “Where Psychology, Spirituality and Philosophy of Physics Meet."

This translation was the first one I ever read, and at the time it really impressed me. But compare for yourself. In the translations below Plato is talking about the God of Love (193b):

1871 Jowett: If we are friends of the God and at peace with him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world at present.
1952 Hamilton: If we are his friends and make our peace with him, we shall succeed, as few at present succeed, in finding the person to love who in the strictest sense belongs to us.
1999 Gill: If we are friends of the god and have him on our side, we shall do what few people now do - find and become close to the loved ones that are really our own.

Here is my favorite translation of 193c, one of the most interesting passages:
"We human beings will never attain happiness unless we find perfect love, unless we each come across the love of our lives and thereby recover our original nature."
--- translated by Robin Waterfield

I'm not a philosophy or ancient history student, I picked up Plato's "Symposium" to challenge myself and see if I could understand it. The "Symposium" is a gathering of Greek thinkers who sit around and give speeches about love.

Phaedrus talks about the greatness of love and how those who have it achieve great things. Pausanias talks of the merits of boy/man love where the boy pleasures the man while the man passes on his wisdom to the boy and that this is the best kind of love, not the lesser lover of procreation between man and woman. Eryximachus talks about how love is the source of all happiness. Aristophanes talks about how once upon a time there was no man or woman but a single human who had both sexes' characteristics. These creatures tried to scale the heavens and so Zeus cut them in half and ever since then man and woman have sought to create that single creature again. Socrates talks about his teacher Diotima and how she taught him that love was the only way human beings could be immortal.

"The Symposium" is a short read not to be rushed as there are some fascinating ideas here. Not new ones though but ones that have influenced western culture and thought for centuries. Aristophanes' and Diotima's especially are ideas I've come across before but didn't know they originated in this text. It's also very pro-pederasty which I thought was amusing and can see why some people might have thought Plato was a closet homosexual. Those Greeks certainly were liberated though.

It's an accesible and interesting little book though this Penguin Great Ideas edition features no notes, contextual history, introduction, glossary, reading list, etc which the Penguin Classics edition does so if you're studying this text I'd get that edition rather than this one.

Short and a relatively easy read (as far as ancient Greek philosophy goes), Plato's Symposium is the perfect way to become acquainted with Plato's philosophy and his Socratic dialogues. Contemporaries of Socrates explain and glorify the nature of love, with Socrates offering the final word. The Symposium offers some important descriptions of Socrates as a person, gives the reader a brief glimpse of Socrates' style of argumentation, lends insight to the cultural mores of Socrates' age and introduces Plato's doctrine of Forms. It will make you want to read the rest of Plato's works.

This is one of my favorite Socratic dialogues. The evidence suggests that Plato wrote it soon after the execution of Socrates, and while I would not say there is a bitter edge to this Gorgias dialogue, I can definitely say that the exchanges do get a little lively at times. At one point, I could almost hear the voices of Socrates and Polus being raised as they argued. Another positive aspect of this dialogue is the fact that it is comparatively easy to understand. Socrates does not start spouting ideas about true Forms or using geometry to prove his points; the more esoteric, more advanced Platonic ideas are to be found in Plato's later writings. In many ways, this dialogue also serves as an introduction to Plato's masterpiece The Republic. Socrates' ideas on some things seem nascent at this point, and he actually contradicts some points he would later make, but the heart of Socratic thought lies within easy grasp in the pages of this dialogue.
The dialogue begins as a discussion about the true nature of oratory. The famed orator Gorgias is in town, and Socrates is most anxious to have a discussion with him. At first, Gorgias' younger friend Polus desires to speak for Gorgias, but he proves little match for Socrates. When Gorgias enters the discussion, Socrates treats him very well, as a respectable man with whom he disagrees, and Gorgias for his part is never flustered by Socrates' description of his art as a knack and as a form of pandering. Later, Callicles bravely jumps into the mix, and things really get interesting. Socrates seemingly admires Callicles' courage to state what he means without shame, yet he winds up getting Callicles to agree with his points in the end. What is it all about? The main points that Socrates makes are that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, and that it is better for a man to be punished for his wrongs than to escape punishment. Implicit in his argument is the belief that all wrongdoing is the result of ignorance; following up on this idea, he declares that dictators and politicians who hold vast powers are the most miserable men of all. He goes so far as to describe Athenian heroes such as Pericles as bad men because the state was less healthy when they left office than when they took office, the proof being that such men eventually lost power and were even ostracized.
For Socrates, happiness comes from being virtuous and self-disciplined. The orator can make a great speech and convince his peers that he is right, but he does this by inculcating belief rather than knowledge in the minds of his audience; he requires no knowledge to win such a debate, and as a result he tells the people what he knows they want to hear rather than what is truly best for them. Right and wrong are immaterial to the orator, Socrates charges. Callicles urges Socrates to give up his immature fixation on philosophy and become a public speaker; were he to be brought to court and charged with a wrong, Callicles tells him that he would be unable to defend himself. Much of the concluding pages consist of a wonderful defense by Socrates of his way of life. He agrees that a court could rather easily try and execute him, but if that were to happen, only his accusers would suffer for it. His thoughts are for the next world, and he has no fear of death because he believes a man with a clean, healthy soul such as his will be given immediate access to the isles of the blessed. The execution of Socrates was clearly on Plato's mind as he wrote this particular discourse.
I would recommend this dialogue to individuals seeking an introduction to Plato's philosophy. The entire discussion is clear throughout and easily comprehensible, and it proves interesting to see how some of Plato's thoughts changed between the years separating this dialogue and The Republic.

This is the same translation as the "Complete Works of Plato" edited by Cooper (known as the "Big Red"), but with an introduction, more notes, and some bibliography. I shouldn't blame the translators for not giving an accurate version of Plato's masterpiece, since their principle of translation is already stated on xxvii: "Our aim has been to produce an idiomatic English version of the Symposium with some literary grace and appropriate variations in style....Sometimes, where the Greek is simple, we have been compelled to be wordy; at other times the situation is reversed." blah blah blah. Fair enough; there should be both literal and literary translations of Plato and I'm happy to see someone attempting the latter while I clearly prefer the former. But there's a limit to everything: just as being overly literal might result in unnecessary unintelligibility that didn't exist in the original, being literary has the danger of turning the practice of translation into paraphrasing. So for example:

(214B where Eryximachus speaks to Alcibiades): " 'This is certainly most improper. We cannot simply pour the wine down our throats in silence: we must have some conversation, or at least a song. What we are doing now is hardly civilized.' What Alcibiades said to him was this: 'O Eryximachus, best possible son to the best possible, the most temperate father: Hi!' " A literal translation of the Greek would be something like this: " 'Is this, Alcibiades, the way we're gonna do this? Namely, we are neither speaking in passing the wine-cup nor singing anything, but simply drinking away like those who are thirsty?' And Alcibiades said, 'O Eryximachus, best of the best and the most temperate father: Hi!' "

Indeed Eryximachus means that simply drinking without speaking or singing is "improper" or "hardly civilized"; but the words aren't there, and it's not difficult to be "idiomatic" or "literary" even if one sticks to what is actually written. The polite and tentative tone of Eryximachus also becomes rather straightforward and blunt. Moreover, I see no reason for adding "possible" in Alcibiades' reply, and it doesn't make it idiomatic in English. Now this example seems to me guilty of paraphrasing without being wrong; but in another case it becomes simply wrong:

185A: "..in every other case it is shameful; both for the deceiver and the person he deceives." The correct translation should be "..in all other cases it is shameful both for the deceived and the one not deceived."

Pausanias' point is this: if the beloved intends to get anything other than virtue, then it doesn't matter whether he is deceived or not, it's totally shameful. And there's also a beauty to that - Pausanias never mentions whether it is shameful for the lover to deceive (because he is the lover of Agathon). By ignoring discussion of whether deceiving is shameful for the lover, Plato artfully points out the flaws inherent in Pausanias' view.

These are only a couple among the many unsatisfactory passages that I've noticed up to now (I only compared about 1/6 of the translation with the Greek, and they're numerous enough to horrify me and post this review). One might think that the cases in which these free renderings and/or mistakes occur do not effect the philosophical issues raised in the Symposium, and that's the purpose for which we read Plato. Well if that is the case I'd rather read a summary of or a secondary book on the Symposium than a translation. And who's to say that these dramatic passages have no or less philosophical content? For Plato philosophy is a way of life, and thus one's actions and words respond to one another. And If idiomatic English can be achieved by being faithful to the Greek, why sacrifice the latter?

To be fair, Nehamas and Woodruff sometimes do a great job of conveying the tone of the original. Like the ending of Agathon's speech (197d-e) wonderfully reproduces the Gorgianic flavor (jingles, alliterations, rhymes) which is important for appreciation of Agathon's account of eros, and which Socrates picks up for criticism. They also treat the obviously more "philosophical" passages with greater care (more specifically, Diotima's speech) and accuracy as far as I can tell. And at least they did note their several choices of translation when it comes to the keywords in the dialogue (again on xxvii). It also has a nice introduction with some very nice notes that help the reader understand the historical background and notice certain ambiguities in the Greek and/or echoes across different speeches. For these reasons it is certainly a usable book to some extent, and considering the price, I'm willing to give it three stars instead of two.

The book is largely devoted to a specious, biased defense of predatory sexual relationships between powerful older men and younger men (and boys) of lesser standing. Jerry Sandusky would have loved it.

Perhaps greatest things about this translation are 1) the Introduction, in which the translators summarize the text and explain why they translated certain ancient Greek words in certain ways; 2) the footnotes, which provide a wealth of historical background information; and 3) the Bibliography at the end, which refers the reader to numerous other books and articles that might help them better understand the text.

Hackett Publishing is the King Midas of Philosophy texts...everything it touches turns to gold. Anything produced by Hackett Publishing is probably the best and most informative translation you are going to find. This Nehamas/Woodruff translation of Plato's Symposium is no different. That being said, I also recommend the similarly structured Nehamas/Woodruff translation of Plato's Phaedrus, which they reference a few times in this version of Symposium.

Symposium is a short read that should take you no longer than 2-3 days to complete. This translation is also very funny when appropriate, as Symposium is supposed to be, which makes it an even easier read. (For example, when Alcibiades enters at the end and exclaims "Good evening, gentlemen! I'm plastered!") But it is also a serious text that explores the very nature of love between both men and women, as well as the Platonic Form of Beauty, from several different points of view. It is one of the most eloquent and literary ancient philosophical texts available, and I highly recommend this translation to anyone looking for a good read on what makes the world go 'round -- love.

A special mood is induced by reading Plato, the product of an elite society whose ideal was leisurely contemplation. Indeed, it is an activity that seems to clash at every point with our own unreflective society whose thought currency is minted in soundbites and advertising slogans. People are not encouraged to be philosophical nowadays, so it is mainly the resort of the antisocial and the willfully eccentric who are in this way enabled to look down on the 'crude, vulgar masses.' Who, reading a book of Plato's, hasn't felt something of this pleasure?
If there is one book by Plato that can be considered to have a more mainstream appeal then it must surely be "The Symposium." The subject of love is of interest to us all and worthy of investigation as behind this word, perhaps the most overstretched in our language, there are so many possible meanings.
With this book we are able to eavesdrop on an after dinner party conversation by some truly great minds. As always, Plato is happy to present more than one view. Of course, the shocking point for the mainstream modern reader is that most of the discussion concerns homosexual love, nevertheless much of what is said can also be applied to many heterosexual situations.
Among the participants presented with perhaps some semblance to their original characters, are the great Athenian comic playwright, Aristophanes, and, towards the end, the party is enlivened by the arrival of the controversial Alcibiades, possibly the most brilliant statesman and soldier of his generation. It is through him and his confession of attempted seduction that we learn a great many details about Plato's mentor, Socrates.
The translator, Christopher Gill, succeeds in presenting the chain of argument in a clear, lucid style, further supplemented by a fine, lengthy introduction and copious notes for those unfamiliar with late fifth century BC Greece.

The Symposium of Plato is a profoundly thought-provoking, entertaining and inspiring piece of philosophical writing. It is very short, yet infinitely more substantial than many longer works.

We are in Athens, 416 B.C.E. The scene is a banquet at the house of Agathon, who had the day before celebrated the victory of his tragedy. By the end of the party, seven men - and one absent but central woman - will have presented their views on the nature and meaning of Eros, or love.

There is no difficulty in keeping the characters distinct in our minds. Plato has great fun contrasting the opinions - and verbal styles - of tragic poet, comic poet, politician, physician and the rest, allowing absurdities and profundities to mingle freely. Socrates is very appealing, saint-like, yet utterly down-to-earth, playing his usual role of a 'philosopher' - one who 'knows only that he does not know' - always in passionate search of the truth, but catching only revelatory glimpses of its perfection.

Phaedrus gives the first speech, praising lovers' (especially homosexual) passion and loyalty, which makes them perform mighty and heroic deeds. Pausanias differentiates between virtuous, or spiritual love, and common, or bodily love. Virtuous love between men should not be primarily about sex, but about improvement and education of the soul. Eryximachus, the doctor, makes a mostly irrelevant (and boring) speech, claiming nature's contrasting elements illustrate the need to balance the healthy and unhealthy aspects of love. Aristophanes then delivers a brilliantly memorable speech, hilarious and poignant by turns, telling of how humans were once two-in-one, back to back, with two heads, four arms and four legs, with three combinations of sexes, male/male, male/female, and female/female. Their strength and speed made them threaten the gods, so Zeus cut them in half, leaving them to search forever for their other halves, and through love attempt to regain their original oneness. Agathon then gives an over-the-top, ecstatic speech, praising love as the youngest, most graceful of the gods, saying he brought order to heaven itself, 'empties men of disaffection and fills them with affection', etc, climaxing with the suggestion we all follow in love's footsteps, 'sweetly singing in his honour'.

It is then Socrates' turn. He performs for all conversations that took place between himself when much younger and Diotima, a 'wise' woman from Mantineia, to whom he had gone for instruction in the highest truths of love. In sum, the lesson is that love is the desire for the everlasting possession of the good and beautiful, which brings happiness. We crave immortality, in order to be happy eternally. We love our offspring, artistic works, laws and institutions, because they are all attempts to achieve an immortal name. These, Diotima claims, are the 'lesser' mysteries of love.

The 'greater' proceed from the 'lesser' in ascending steps. From one beautiful body the lover creates 'fair notions', then he sees all bodies are similar and equally worthy of love. From bodies he proceeds to the beauty of the virtuous mind, then the beauties of institutions and laws, climbing from there to the beauty of the sciences, until, after much growth in wisdom, he reaches the vision of all creation as beautiful. The final step is to rise to the contemplation of unchanging, eternal, absolute beauty itself. To spend your life in union with perfect beauty allows you to bring forth 'real' things, not 'images' and 'be immortal, if mortal man may'.

A drunken Alcibiades bursts in at this point, and gives a rambling, often funny, speech about his love for Socrates and how he - a very beautiful man - was spurned sexually by him. He describes Socrates' near-supernatural control of himself, totally above the effects of pain and pleasure. The book ends with a description of Socrates' companions all falling asleep as dawn breaks (after all-night drinking) and his going about his usual day.

Throughout the Symposium, Plato makes it clear that sexual relations are not the best thing at all for 'lovers'; they who wish for the highest happiness must seek to grow in virtue and wisdom and become increasingly detached from earthly pleasures. This is the origin of the phrase 'Platonic love'. Women were not considered their intellectual and spiritual equals in Athens at the time, so men of sophistication had to look to each other for emotional sustenance.

What then, we may ask, can the Symposium offer human beings today who are not interested in purely mystical/intellectual living and prefer the sexual and emotional satisfactions found in personal relationships?

A great deal, I believe. In his introduction Benjamin Jowett states that Plato 'is conscious that the highest and noblest things in the world are not easily severed from the sensual desires, or may even be regarded as a spiritual form of them'. In other words, earthly pleasures and transcendent ones are inextricable. Plato used words such as 'good' and 'virtue' to describe freeing oneself from the world of the senses, by using our reason to choose correctly who - or what - to attach to as we move through life. If we choose correctly, be it friends, sexual or lifetime partners, we strengthen our sense of inner freedom, until finally we experience it at the deepest, mystical level - the profound shift in consciousness that Plato was pointing to as the highest good - which in and of itself is morally and values-neutral.

The genius of Plato is that he communicates the total commitment required to attain perfect freedom, and the moral obligation of all human beings to strive for the happiness it alone can deliver.

This book desperately needs another round of editing. Many obvious typos (like an uncapitalized word at the start of a new sentence, a "c" inexplicably thrown in between words, "fist" instead of "first," etc. Often two or more typos on a single page. It's not a long text -- someone really fell down on the job here.

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Plato's "Symposium" is the story of Agathon's dinner party where conversation takes place with a small group of men, who recline, eat and drink around a table offering their views on Love. This story is an amazing account of how intelligent and yet so different a culture the men from ancient Greece were compared to our society today. Each speaker has this most amazing ability to tell two stories at the very same time, an creative artistic movement of what love 'is' in each and every story. applying and , metaphorically. intertwining a cultural, mythological story of the gods, giving far deeper meaning. In addition to this, the love relationships and sexual nature of these men also permeate an entire cultural feel to the story, enveloping a radical differentiation from our de-mystified and de-enchanted world back into a once existing world of substantial meaning and profundity.
Phaedrus, speaks first and relates how love is the greatest good, the beautiful, is shameful of ugly things and how only lovers are willing to die for one another.
The second speaker, Pausanias, applies two types of love, one Aphrodite, a common base love working at random with men's feelings, for money, for loving physical bodies, boys, men and women. The other type of love, from a much younger goddess, being a higher type, the heavenly, who only loves other men and boy love, but this is not physical body love but from affection of the mind of virtue and wisdom..
Aristophanes has the hiccups, so it is Eryximachus, a doctor, who speaks third, applying the idea of love as a double love; "for bodily health and disease are by common consent different things and unlike, and what is unlike desires and loves things unlike." p.82 The god of art was said to implant love as a healing art, all such love guided by this god. "It is quite illogical to say that a harmony is at variance with itself or is made up of notes still at variance." "So love as a whole has great and mighty power, or in a word, omnipotence ."
Aristophanes, the comic writer, gives a moving account of Love as a absolute human need, a desire for completion to the point of each person once shaped differently being cut in half, taking our current shape, in need of the other to complete the whole of what we once were. "For first there were three sexes, not two as at present, male and female, but also a third having both together," and they were violent, strong and forceful and would even attack the gods. So Zeus and the other gods held a meeting and decided to cut them in halves and make them weaker. From then on, they were sexually drawn to one another, both heterosexual and homosexual, reasons all due to the way of the cutting of the halves.Lesbianism and boy to man love is freely spoken of and justified according to this story of the gods. His moving speech on the beauty and virtue of love however, is according to Socrates, true only in the sense of romanticism and fictional idolatrous admiration of what love should be. For Socrates found such a romantic explanation of love as untrue to what love really is and what love contains, as it does not contain all the beauty and good.
The fourth speaker, Agathon gives a moving speech on the beauty and virtue of love however, it is according to Socrates, true only in the sense of romanticism and fictional idolatrous admiration of what love should be. "For all the gods are happy . . and love is the happiest of them all being the most beautiful and best . . the youngest of gods." In his speech, love is every good, virtuosos and beautiful thing.
The last speaker, Socrates, found such a romantic explanation of love to be untrue, for what desires good, virtue and wisdom is only something that does not contain such, something lacking, and therefore lacking it desires such things. Love only desires what it lacks. Love is neither beautiful nor ugly. "To have right opinion without being able to give reason is neither to understand nor is it ignorance. Right opinion is no doubt something between knowledge and ignorance."
It is so interesting how common and free sexuality and homosexuality were, how each man present commented on the beauty of the young men in their glory of youth. Alcibiades, jealous of Agathon, also a young beautiful male, makes a moving speech how Socrates refused his love and how other like young men, also were moved with his amazing wisdom and prose.
While women are generally discounted, and the bonding of affection in male love was considered a higher love by Pausanias, Socrates explanation of love, by far the most profound, was one he received from a woman named Diotima. Here, as another reviewer has stated, shows Plato's the egalitarianism and wisdom, like that of the beauty and ultimate goal of Love.
Later a group of men crash the party and the drinking really gets started. Some leave, while Socrates stays all night, never loosing integrity from his drinking and leaves with all his integrity.

Plato's poetic masterpiece remains the most pleasurable and beautiful of his dialogues. An extraordinary account of the nature of love as eros, this text is paradigmatic in its application of myth, dialectic, and poesis. Socrates reports on the speech of Diotima, perhaps one of the most extraordinary of Platonic accounts-her speech is a miraculous presentation of the ascension of erotic love and the nature of desire. This is a brilliant presentation of the forms, and the only account devoted to a god (eros). Nehamas' translation remains the best. The Symposium continues to complicate the classical distinction between philosophy and poetry, between logos and poesis. It is a sublime literary achievement.

I assigned this to my political theory students last year, and learned what a fine job Arieti and Barrus have done. There are several other good translations out there; this one is more literal, but it makes good English sense nevertheless ("graspingness" and a few other awkward choices notwithstanding).

The great value of this edition, however, is the insightful scholarly introduction, the very helpful footnotes, the three appendices, and the glossary. The first appendix includes speeches from Thucydides which are relevant to the arguments about rhetoric from the Gorgias. The second one is an outline of the rhetorical principles laid out by the interloculotrs of the Gorgias, and the third is a short discussion of Socrates' use of the terms mythos and logos. The best thing in editorial materials, however, is the glossary, which offers extended scholarly explanations of key terms in the Gorgias and in Platonic philosophy generally.

On the downside: The translators have tried to show all the moving parts, as it were, of their work with the Greek text. So when they've supplied an English word not directly translated from a Greek word, they've put it in brackets. Some versions of the Bible do this as well. But the brackets are frequent and can get quite distacting at times, especially fro my undergrads I imagine. A more general concern with this choice would be: If you read Greek, you don't need Barrus and Arieti to tell you which words are direct translations and which aren't. But if you don't know Greek, you don't know what to do with this information, because you don't understand how the Greek sentence gets a long without these extra words. So it's seems like a pointless practice. Translate! And then when the readers learn Greek they can take a look at how you've done it.

Overall: a very impressive work, from two very careful and insightful readers and translators of Plato.

It is rather difficult to review Plato's Symposium from a modern viewpoint. The attempts by Agathon's guests, including Socrates, to define love are largely based on the love of boys rather than women. While that is a difficult concept for me to ponder, I recognize that such a social custom prevailed to some degree in ancient Athens and will attempt to offer an unbiased view of the text. Basically, partygoers celebrating Agathon's first victory in a drama contest decide to do something besides drink themselves into a stupor because they are still paying for such activity the night before. Socrates joins the group on this second night, and it is decided that each man in turn will offer his praises to love. Each of six men offer their interesting, diverse thoughts on the matter, ranging from the conventional to the Socratic ideal. Phaedrus says that the greatest good a boy can have is a gentle lover and that the greatest good a lover can have is a boy to love. He stresses self-sacrifice and virtue as the kind of love the gods love most. Pausanias describes two kinds of love: vulgar love is best explained as love for a woman in the interest of sexual satisfaction; noble love is that concerned with bettering the soul of the object of love (necessarily a young boy). The doctor Eryximachus explains love in terms of harmony, and he goes so far as to credit the vague notion of love with accomplishing all kinds of things in a diverse set of subjects. Aristophanes begins by relating a myth about man's origins. When man was created, individuals were actually attached back to back; the gods later split each human entity in half, and love consists of each person's search for his "missing half" who can be of either sex; even when two mates find one another, their love is imperfect because they cannot become literally attached as they were originally. Agathon says that Love is the youngest of the gods, that he offers the means by which all disputes between the gods and between men are settled, and emphasizes the beauty of love (represented quite well by himself, he seems to say).
Socrates, as can be expected, shifts the discussion of love to a higher plane. Claiming to know the art of love if nothing else, Socrates tells how he gained his knowledge from a fictional character called Diotima. He says that love represents the desire to give "birth in beauty," that love is neither a god or a mortal but is instead the messenger between god and man. To love is to want to acquire and possess the good forever and thus attain immortality. Socrates goes on to give a very important speech about one of Plato's perfect Forms--namely, the Form of Beauty. The advanced lover will learn to seek Beauty in its abstract form and will take no more notice of physical beauty; the perfect lover is a philosopher who can create virtue in its true form rather than produce mere images of virtue. This short summary in no way does justice to Socrates' speech, but it gives the general idea. After Socrates speaks, a drunken Alcibiades (Socrates' own beloved) crashes the party and commences to give a speech about Socrates, the effect of which is to identify Socrates as a lover who deceives others into loving him. As both lover and beloved, Socrates is seemingly held up by Plato as the true embodiment of love. To truly love is to be a philosopher.
I myself don't hold this text in as high regard as many intellectuals, but there can be no doubt of this dialogue's influence on Western thought over the centuries. The book succeeds in the presentation of advanced philosophical ideas and as literature. The discussion of the Form of Beauty is particularly useful in terms of understanding Platonic thought. It would seem that this dinner party and the speeches we read are very likely fictitious and represent Plato's thoughts much more closely than Socrates' own views, but it is impossible to tell to what extent this is true. The Symposium is inarguably one of Plato's most influential, most important texts and is required reading for anyone seriously interested in philosophy as it has existed and continues to exist in Western society.

Enthralling, entertaining, educational, and thought-provoking, "The Symposium" is one of Plato's classics. A group of men gathered at a dinner party in ancient Greece discuss the topic of love. Each man offers his view or definition of love, and the results are all different, engaging, and full of symbolism. Although it is a short book, one must not read it once and put it away; it ought to be be read again and again just to compare to what is "picked up on" each time. One thing always puzzles me: I will never know why Plato included the doctor (his name escapes me at the moment) have a bout of hiccups during someone's speech. I have never come up with a satisfactory answer - nor has any one I know, either. Nevertheless, this is an excellent read that I highly recommend for anyone - student and nonstudent. Enjoy!

Plato's "Symposium" will always be read because there will always be people who question the nature of Love. Agathon's dinner party is the scene of a conversation between a small group of men, who go around the table offering their views on Love. What does Love mean to us to-day? Reading over the responses of the dinner-guests and their host, we find the same range of answers in Ancient Greece that we are likely to find now.
Phaedrus and Pausanias are utilitarians and materialists. Phaedrus looks at love between people and a proto-Burkean love for government and state. Pausanias complicates the argument, saying that there are two different kinds of love, one which is common and one which is heavenly - yet still oriented towards the real and the tangible. Eryximachus is a proto-Swedenborg, trying to reconcile or harmonize the two kinds of love.
The jewels of Plato's "Symposium" are Aristophanes and Socrates. Aristophanes gives us the profoundly moving depiction of Love as a fundamental human need, a desire for completion. For a writer of comedy, whose aim as an art form is forgiveness and acceptance, Aristophanes's explanation is no surprise, though its depth is amazing. While women are generally discounted throughout the "Symposium," not only does Socrates, as we might expect, completely astound his audience (both inside the book and out) with his progressively logical and ascendant view of Love, but he also does it through the voice of a woman, Diotima. When we realize that Socrates is a character in this fiction, and that his words originate in a woman, the egalitarianism and wisdom of Plato the author truly shines forth, like the absolute beauty he claims as the ultimate goal of Love.
Was Plato a feminist? I don't know. I do know that the "Symposium" is a tremendous book. I picked it up and did not stop reading it until I was finished. The style of the Penguin translation is smooth, with a lighthearted tone that can make you forget that you are reading philosophy. Plato's comedic masterpiece in the "Symposium" is the character of Alcibiades, who provides the work a fitting end. Get the "Symposium" and read it now. You cannot help but Love it...in a Platonic sort of way.

The symposium is Plato's famous dialogue on love. He brings together some of the greatest minds of Athens and together they debate the nature of Eros, the parentage of Love, and the Divine. Aristophanes, the comic, explains the human desire to unite with another using his favorite device: humor. Socrates, for whom Plato obviously has enormous admiration, gives us more pearls of wisdom, this time concerning love, beauty, and the ascent of man. Even the great general and statesman Alcibiades makes a cameo toward the end scene of the dinner-party.
At the very least, we learn about the Greek concept of Love. From this book we may garner a far deeper understanding of Eros than we might have previously hoped. This is the finest of Plato's works, in my opinion.
The Symposium will continue to tower among Western literature as a work of truly insightful genius. Buy this book and be prepared for enlightenment.

This is perhaps the most enjoyable of Plato's dialogues, and one of the most enduring.
Plato imagines his mentor Socrates, the comic playwright Aristophanes, and other Athenian luminaries of the Golden Age met for a dinner party and a night of discussion on the nature of love. The various guests present their positions in manners ranging from thoughtful to hilarious, but all of this is but an appetizer for the main course: Socrates' concept of Eros as the fuel for the soul's ascent to the Divine, as revealed in Socrates' reminiscence of his own mentor, Diotima, the woman of Mantinea. At the end, a drunken Alcibiades breaks in upon the festivities to reveal Socrates as an avatar of the very divine Eros which he praises.
Robin Waterfield's Oxford translation is one of the best. He captures each speaker's individual idiom, a major translational feat in itself. That he is able to do so and also render the text into lucid modern English is a further coup. The Oxford edition also includes an extensive introduction, very helpful notes, and a complete bibliography.
The Symposium is great philosophy, great literature, an intimate peek at the social life of one of western civilization's formative eras, a work of spiritual inspiration and transformation, and, not least, a wonderful read. Most highly recommended!

Plato's Gorgias is one of the masterpieces not just of the Western, but of any Canon, and Waterfield's translation for Oxford World's Classics adds an informative introduction and many helpful explanatory notes. I have used this text for years in my ethics classes, and every time I read it I come away with something new. Plato pits Socrates, the defender of moral realism, against three opponents who represent varying degrees of moral relativism: Gorgias, the Elder Statesman of Sophistry, Polus, a young turk who is quickly trapped by Socrates, and Callicles, one of the greatest characters in all of philosophical literature, who presents a case not unlike that of Nietzsche's Uebermensch. Though it is difficult to say whether Socrates is fully successful in refuting his interlocutors, watching him try is both exciting and informative, and can serve as an excellent introduction to moral philosophy.

We all like to chat about romance around a dinner table but what is romance and love all about? Well, Symposium is one of the most serious discussions about this issue datable to the 5th century BCE. At that time, Greeks at dinner parties used to sprawl themselves on couches with food and wine and a little music, be ministered by slaves and while eating or after have a spirited conversation/discussion. Well this "soire" takes place with Socrates, and its details are related second hand by the author Plato.

As translations go, this particular issue is one of the best on the market and the author had discussed it's details with a Kabbalist teacher of mine Glynn Davies. A translation is dependent to a greater or lesser extent on the author's appreciation and interpretation of the sorts of contents involved - and this translation is pretty current. There is a good introduction about the characters, especially Alcibiades and Xenophon who were real people from the time.

I think this book is a wonderful evocation of deep thinking from the Greek world starting with sensual love and then going on to describe a sort of spiritual love that subverts our expectations of what we would understand by Love personified as a deity. Socrates is in the beginning seen to enter into a meditational reverie which probably indicates that some such sages did meditate as in Indian traditions in order to obtain wisdom. Later, Socrates recounts the wisdom transmitted by an Oracle called Diotima (almost as if to say, "this is not what I think (though it is actually) but it was conveyed to me as follows by this trustworthy source".

Some of your friends should appreciate the wisdom of this book. Above all, it is The Symposium, the important conversation among friends at dinner talking about something of the sublime in a way that echoes but also seriously deepens the level of our own more mundane discussions on romance and true love that crop up regularly if you're at that sort of age.

Dover offers an excellent edition of the Greek text, with a brief but probing introduction, and extensive notes on vocabulary and grammar. The notes, as always in the Cambridge editions, seem hard to scan for a particular passage. Dover at least had the foresight to group his notes into smaller clumps, set in accord with the Stephanus numbers. This makes searching for the note on some particular line or phrase far more straightforward.

All philosophy, yesterday's and today's, is a battle between the two ancient Greeks, Plato and his student Aristotle. Thus, people who wants to understand the world, needs to know what each of these sages is saying, what the different premises of the two men are, and what are the ramifications of what they are saying.

This is no exaggeration. Take religion as an example. Plato's approach to life affected the way the general population understand religion, while Aristotle offered the intellectuals a realistic rational view of religion. What is the difference between them?

Plato had an otherworldly non-naturalistic idea of the world. How can people define anything, how can they relate to it? There is, Plato answered, an ideal that exists outside this world. Plato never said where this ideal is located - in the mind or in heaven or floating around in the upper atmosphere. An object, he claimed, is defined by how much it is like the ideal. Thus, for example, there is an ideal table and the table on earth can be called a table if and only if it is like the ideal table.

Take love as an example. Plato's Symposium describes a drinking party where Socrates and his acquaintances try to define love. Plato is a masterful writer, and the dialogue is filled with very entertaining dissimilar ideas. However, Socrates, Plato's hero and teacher, states that true love is love that is like the ideal of love.

This is clever, but it is not informative. It seems like a joke. But it isn't a joke. People lived according to Plato's worldview and abandoned thinking during the medieval dark ages until the renaissance when individuals, at least the more educated, began to rethink and reaccept the ideas of Aristotle. Of course, even during the dark ages there were some scholars who lived as Aristotle taught, but only a handful of people.

Plato's notion of the otherworldly unnatural ideal affected many religions. People, said the clerics, must organize their lives according to ideals that are in heaven. People, they said must not think about religion on their own. Why should they think? There is only one way to think and act, and it is the ideal that is in heaven.

Aristotle had a radically different rational and natural view. He encouraged people to think. They must examine nature, experiment with it and discover the truth. A good table has nothing to do with heaven; it is an object that serves people best to eat on, work on, put objects on, etc. Love is not what matches a heavenly ideal; it is a human relationship built on respect and trust, on ability to work with another for mutual benefits.

So, too, with religion. One can if one wants believe in a divine revelation. However the revelation continues and grows as humans grow. The revelation occurs here on earth; it is not an ideal in heaven. Teachings are revealed in the events of history and in scientific experiments and advances.

Thus, Plato's views are significant, for they are the past and they are the present that should be avoided. People need to enter the world bravely, open-mindedly, think, act and grow.

I bought this textbook for my Classical Philosophy class (which was taught by William Placher - check his books out, they're awesome), and the Symposium really got me thinking about what love really is. What's cool about the work is that while each of the speeches make some great points, in the end they never really decide on a final answer, so it's still your call.
I liked the Symposium so much, that I decided to buy it as a gift for my friend. It was then that I realized how superior the Woodruff version is - other versions I found in bookstores featured commentary that was sometimes more than twice as long as the actual work! In this version, on the other hand, the introduction is short but informative - therefore you're not paying extra to hear some other guy give his two cents on Plato's work, when Plato's words themselves are really all you're interested in.

One of the better dialogues in that it manages to raise most of the big issues of virtue and citizenship in way which does not feel to rushed or overly contrived. It's the first dialogue I've read which actually made me smirk when Socrates offered a witty retort or a brilliant condemnation of someone else's views. to someone. It's also a lot of fun to hate on Callicles.

Perhaps the most "literary" of all Plato's works, "Symposium" is the story of a dinner party gathering of great (and a few not so great) minds, whom engage in a discussion in praise of eros, or passionate love. It is considered literary because it is highly metaphorical, it's characters are drawn well and in some cases unforgettably, and it succeeds on many levels. It is not uncommon for Socrates to elevate the subject of discussion in any given dialogue to that of our earthly existence, and how we should go about it. Perhaps shocking to readers unfamiliar with the Greeks is the prevalence of homosexual love, particularly with young boys. But, if nothing else, this is an insight into ancient culture. And the absolutely magnificent speeches given by Aristophanes and Socrates remain profound and beautiful to modern readers, regardless of whether or not the other speeches are unpalatable to some. Also, Alcibiades, drunken, hilarious rant is not to be missed. Read in a single sitting, this work is almost sublime.

My low rating accounts for the inaccurate translation, which COMPLETELY VEILS what Plato wants to communicate to us in the Symposium!!!

Of course, the translators cannot be blamed for not knowing the CODE that is necessary to grasp his impressive Dialogue. I give an example to indicate what I mean.

Plato (Phaido 64a) claims that the philosophía, a key metaphor in all his Dialogues including the Symposium, deploys a particular practice: “Those, who happen to grasp the philosophía correctly, risk being unrecognised by others because it is nothing but 'practising to die and to be dead'”.

He addresses with these words what he calls in Phaidros (81a) the pleasurable (phaidros) PRACTICE OF DYING (meléte thanátou). It is for him (Phaedo 67a) the practice that avoids the “follies of sóma (the bodily or lowest of all worlds grasped by the familiar senses)” to “gain direct (unconditioned) knowledge (gnósis, epistéme) of all that is pure and uncontaminated”. This is a reference to extraordinary self-observed perceptions, obtained by the practice of dying that the ordinary senses cannot provide. It is a reference to the recollection (anamnésis) that "comes out of itself" during the PRACTICE.

I conclude this from his remarks in the Republic that “there is in every psyché an organ or instrument of knowledge” which is “blinded by ordinary pursuits (i.e. by the deployment of the familiar senses)”. Translated as “eye of the psyché” (Phaedo 66e), he declares (Republic 527e) that this is our (i.e. the practitioner's) “exclusive means of beholding the ultimate truth.” This is a reference to what Plotin calls the “ascent of the psyché”, which the practice of dying permits for motivated and talented practitioners. It is the KEY to the UNWRITTEN DOCTRINE that has been ignored for the interpretation of the written philosophía since it was lost, when the last neo-Pythagorean/neo-Platonic schools were closed.

I am pretty sure that I have REDISCOVERED the practice of dying in the Dao-practice of the Great Path (Dadao) that I was taught by my Tai Chi teacher. It is a step-wise path that reawakens extra-ordinary senses (enhances the psyché). It is in perfect agreement with what we read in the Symposium (209e5-212a7), which contains Diotima’s description of the path by which a young man ascends to the VISION OF THE BEAUTIFUL.

I describe this ascent by calling on my experience with the Dao-practice in The Socrates Code (For a review see: “Man, the measure of all things?” in The Philosopher, V. 102 No. 2, 2014). I RIGOROUSLY revise there the strongly misinterpreted philosophía. Martin Cohen, the Editor of the Philosopher, writes in its Preface with reference to Plato’s Symposium, which I show to be neither a Banquet nor a Drinking Party, but a get-together of practitioners:

One more powerful image I offer the reader, before they set off on what must be a difficult and challenging read, is that of Socrates standing‚ ‘as if transfixed’ for hours in the middle of the road while he seemed to struggle with some thought or another. We read about such things in several of Plato’s dialogues, for example the beginning of the Symposium or ‘Drinking Party’ dialogue which mentions almost in passing this:

‘... later another servant came in and reported that our friend Socrates had retired into the portico of the neighbouring house. ‘There he is fixed,’ he said, ‘and when I call to him he will not stir.’ How strange, said Agathon; then you must call him again, and keep calling him. ‘Let him alone’, said my informant, ‘he has a way of stopping anywhere and losing himself without any reason. I believe that he will soon appear, do not therefore disturb him.’

Such stories make little sense to modern readers, other than to indicate that Socrates was evidently (a) eccentric, and (b) some sort of thinker. But to those familiar with the Eastern tradition, the sight of people standing immobile is not so bizarre – it is a standard posture of Tai Chi, and if Socrates stood immobile all day and all night as Plato tells us, this could indicate not so much how odd a person he was as how experienced a practitioner (in Tai Chi terms, follower of the Path to Truth) he was.

With characteristic care for detail, Peter puts it this way: ‘Standing: The best posture to implement Wuwei.

Wuwei – the Chinese equivalent of Greek philía - is the only principle that makes it possible to have “stillness create self-movements” on the mental, psychic and bodily plane. “Standing” is better for this purpose than any other posture. It permits creative unconditioned self-movements of the mind, psyché and body in all possible directions to explore the unknown.

See also my critical reviews here on the store on:

Plato: Timaeus and Critias (Penguin Classics), translated by Desmond Lee Plato Republic (Hackett Classics), translated by C. D. C. Reeve,
Plato: Republic (Hackett Classics), translated by C. D. C. Reeve,
Theology of Arithmetic, by Robin Butterfield,
The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus (Bloomsbury Revelations), by Martin Heidegger.

For futher details see my Youtube presentation. TAO: PATH TO DISCOVER THE PSYCHO-COSMIC ORIGIN OF THE WESTERN CULTURE.

If there are few things that almost all species seems to discuss, it's love. that desire, the longing to connect with another human being in this chaotic world. although there have been many plights about the desire for love, lack of love, or the quest to get love, it all seems to tie back to one of the most popular (and i will guess earliest?) works on love published, Plato's symposium.
The plot, like all Greek works, is pretty simple. A couple of men get together, get drunk, and talk about praising Eeros, the god of erotic love. Some of the speeches (I can't really remember them) are in praise of a god, and other speak of how to respect Eros properly, whom to love, and how poeple came to love others. Some were dry, some were entertaining, but all were informative and made me think of love in a new light.
There's not much action in this play, but I think that is a trait of all Greek plays. Plato is more concerned about the philosophy and dialouge than the action behind it. Symposium i think inspired many of the dramas and romantic comedie currently out there. I just wish films about love were as smart and as intelligent as this one.

Socrates demonstrates how wisdom is better than any other pursuit, including sex. Most of us moderns don't believe Socrates!

There are a number of things that a Christian could find some parallel to in the wisdom literature of Scripture, especially Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

Nichols' translation of Gorgias is indeed impressive. I have heard and read other translations of Gorgias- but the word choice of those other translation is too unadmirable(like "knack"-a word that is not fitted with Platonic dialogues). Nichols keeps consistent and easily understandable words. He doesn't go about saying "smart" words- unlike others who seem to try and exhaust their vocab. before they finish the work.

This classic piece is about the base attractions of mankind. It was obviously written in a time when such discussion blurred the lines between morality and reality. A very interesting look into mankind at that point in history and human society development.

Such a disappointment.
The story is all about a group of drunken, slave holding, homosexual pedophiles that try to explain why a specific Greek god is so wonderful. The Greek god, obviously is not real, but they are stupid enough to believe he is. They spend much of their drunken dialog telling about their boy lovers and the virtue of having sex with children. It really was a waste of time and money.