The question as to why Socrates is not afraid of dying arises early in the dialogue. Socrates provides several reasons for his calm attitude in the fa...
I fully agree. It's just that when people take for their model the likes of Strauss who wrote: - L Strauss, On Plato's Symposium, p. 199 then the whol...
I think the Phaedo is a very interesting and very important dialogue if one wants to correctly understand Plato. As long as one avoids reading it thro...
Not all statements being made here are correct. For example, the statement "At 107b Socrates tells them to keep investigating, to not be content with ...
Correct: But in connection to other comments that have been made here, I think it is important to note that at 70a Cebes requests “reassurance (paramy...
Sure. However, the allegory does not refer to the sound. Harmonia here does not have the sense of sound but of state or condition (of being joined tog...
Well, I think my LSJ shows very clearly that the primary meaning of ???? psyche is “life” and, by extension, “soul” exactly as Socrates says. In addit...
I think one way of looking at it is as a hierarchy of awareness or experience: 1. Consciousness (individual) perceives physical objects in sensory per...
The term psyche or "soul" was initially used by Homer in the sense of “departed soul, ghost. But it was also used with reference to “conscious self”, ...
The Soviet Union was propped up by US investments and loans from 1917 to the 1980s. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan found out and stopped all techni...
I agree that it may not be a good critique, but the bottom line is that the Soviet system was to a significant degree dependent on the capitalist West...
Yes. I meant that people often conceive of Plato's ideas as some kind of mental "objects" when in fact they are part of the subject. Though not the in...
Presumably, OECD = Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and ECP = Economic Calculation Problem Economic Calculation in the Socialist...
Well, if things exist by virtue of their participating in their distinctive being or Form (Phaedo 101c), then the soul becomes more real after death t...
My theory is that intelligible objects like numbers or like Plato's Ideas are too close to the subject that thinks about them to be perceived as objec...
I think the reliability of economic data from a secretive dictatorship like the USSR is rather doubtful. Plus, the Soviets received a lot of financial...
Well, that's right. Belief or doxa can certainly have different meanings. To begin with, there is ordinary belief or opinion and right belief or opini...
And the other thing is that Socrates himself mentions the word "belief" quite a few times, and not always in a negative sense. So, clearly, not all be...
But truth depends on our knowledge of it. And the OP title says "understanding of reality." So it seems to imply knowledge or perception. Otherwise, h...
I think that to label all beliefs "shameful" is an unwarranted exaggeration. Surely, not all beliefs are equal in terms of objective validity, moral a...
You could think of it this way. There is a truth in the sense of a set of, say, scientific or political facts. Now the uneducated have some knowledge ...
Well, when we say "absolute" it presumably means more complete or less conditional. So, if you were to take a hierarchy of truths that are less and le...
Quite possibly, "absolute truth" is a "continuously held truth", i.e. a truth that is always held to be a truth. The question is, how long do we need ...
Correct. But that would be in terms of moral value. Whereas the truth of an action would refer to the action taking place. That's why I said it depend...
I think it depends on what you mean by "truth". Truth tends to change if the relation between the factors that constitute the truth change. For exampl...
Sure. That is where opinions diverge. I agree that Plato's arguments are not particularly strong. However, according to scholars, his dialogues are si...
I don't have an infallible argument at all. In fact, it makes no difference to me either way. I just think that when reading a dialogue we should try ...
I tend to believe that some form of bias is natural, as @180 Proof says. This may be (a) bias against the different and (b) bias against the unknown. ...
Well, you can always email Plato and suggest he write another dialogue. Ideally in 21st-century English or in Mandarin, as the case may be. Perhaps he...
The passage in question says this: 1. A harmony is by nature a harmony according to the degree to which it is harmonized. 2. If it is harmonized more ...
There is no need for the arguments in the dialogue to "hold up to rigorous logical examination". If the arguments are accepted as valid in the dialogu...
The correct translation of 93b is: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0170%3Atext%3DPhaedo%3Asection%3D93b The obvi...
The Forms are obviously discussed in the dialogue, but Socrates and Simmias agree on the Forms. What they disagree on is the nature of soul and whethe...
Correct. I think humans are very ingenious creatures that are extremely good at setting rules and then constructing mechanisms that enable them to cir...
It definitely is not about universals at all. And another question (at 93b) is the fact that a harmony can be greater or lesser, whereas a soul cannot...
That's an interesting point. Apparently, according to the Dalai Lama, Is It Permissible For Buddhists To Eat Meat? Obviously, when eating meat is unav...
Correct. I think Aquinas is a very good example of how Christianity faithfully preserved Plato’s core teachings for many centuries. Although some seek...
The worth of time is highly important in more than one sense. In Ancient Greek tradition, the souls of the departed go to the other world which is rul...
Correct. Simmias himself acknowledges that his theory, though "held by many", has not been demonstrated and he discards it in favor of recollection an...
But the fact that it is impossible to communicate does not necessarily mean that there is no common element in that experience that all conscious bein...
You may have a point there, depending on how mediated or distorted the experience is, which is probably hard to tell in cases of severe psychological ...
Sounds like a good enough example to me. And, who knows, maybe with a bit of luck it will someday snowball into a proper movement, put pressure on gov...
However, even a "fragile" self is and therefore is still a self. The self is grounded in the experience of being. The pure experience of being is alwa...
Do you mean "expression" or "term"? The Republic has ?? ???????? ta diplasia, “the double or ambiguous things” from ????????? diplasios, “twofold” (Re...
The Republic says: The text has ???????? ??? ?????? epekeina tes ousias “beyond essence”. The later Platonist term is ?????????? hyperousios “above be...
- St Peter of Damaskos, Book II, Twenty-Four Discourses, XXIII, Holy Scripture Again, no Christian would infer from the unknowability of God's purpose...
St Gregory Palamas writes: – St Gregory Palamas, Topics of Natural and Theological Science and on the Moral and Ascetic Life: One Hundred And Fifty Te...
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