Honestly, this whole allegory seemed to me like Plato was just buttmad the athenian government put socrates to death, and so he decided to try and get into power by calling everyone stupid and saying that only philosophers were smart enough to rule a nation.
Why would anyone in their right mind think this would work?
What was he trying to prove with this?
This thread illustrates perfectly the necessity of secondary sources, especially in a world where peabrains like OP are taught to read
in my opinion plato was the original hipster.
Secondary sources?
What?
Speedreader, please read earlier dialogues before jumping into the republic. The allegory of the cave has nothing to do with government.
op obviously didn't read what he's talking about, and secondary sources are fine, but if you read them before reading the text you're a brainwashed brainlet.
The main point of the allegory is that philosophers are laughed at for telling the truth, and often killed or exiled (so you're kind of right about it being an echo of Socrates' trial). However, it's more about treatment of philosophy and how you should expect the public to treat the truth, over anything political.
There is that, but unfortunately Plato is also a dipshit and he ruined philosophy by being an autist. His forms are a crock of shit.
>start of the semester and Yea Forums is full of philosophy freshmen again, who are currently reading about plato, socrates and aristotle as an introductory
Oh god I cant wait for yet another thread about some smoothbrain not understanding Plato's line.
I'm just taking this course so I can apply to med school as a philosophy major.
plato was completey wrong
Uhh no, book 7 most definitely is about politics.
was plato right about democracy though?
Switzerland and Finland are the closest thing to direct democracy nowadays and they seem to be doing pretty well.
athenian democracy isnt the same democracy we have today
it was indeed fucking retarded
>and they seem to be doing pretty well
Depends on your speed.
Resentment is probably the worst argument in history.
read the Laws
Freshmen/Sophomore philosophy classes attract by far the most pseuds. Soon they'll get their C- papers back, where they were sure they disproved the existence of God and then slink away to their communications major.
t. TA who marks first/second year papers.
Close to direct democracies only work in places with small homogeneous populations that educated and well off beforehand.
It's also the biggest problem in history.
It's about Plato's epistemology and theory of forms.
How does the allegory suggest that philosophers should be in power?
Not the Republic, mind, where that's explicit, but in the cave allegory specifically.
Is there any actual proof Socrates was put to death?
The whole trial and execution seems like a farce out of some dystopian novel. It's too ridiculous to have happened, even by ancient standards.
it doesnt seem that implausible
im pretty sure there are many people that would kill modern philosophers if it was possible
There's a stance from which it seems reasonable. He was a lover (of a sort) to Alcibiades, who went afoul of the Athenians twice, and he associated with Critias and Charmides, the former being the man who led the group called the Thirty put in charge of Athens by the Spartans after Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, and the latter being one of the Thirty's leaders of the Piraeus. One could ask whether his manner of intense questioning led those men to view politics in a way divorced from the view of the democracy, and whether, in that case his philosophizing endangered Athens by questioning the beliefs and opinions propping up their regime and way of life.
Additionally, there are suggestions in some ancient accounts that the real hope was that he'd either agree to stop philosophizing, or, especially when it became clear during his trial that he wouldn't, that he'd take an offer from one of his friends and flee Athens for some other part of Greece where he wouldn't be such a direct nuisance. It seems though that he was pretty insistent in letting the trial and its sentence take its course, partly to show that philosophy was cowardly, but also for selfish reasons related to recognizing the dimming of his powers with old age.
>partly to show that philosophy was cowardly
*wasn't, obviously
>animeposter is the only correct poster
Never change lit
The Allegory of the cave is actually about ontology, language and reason. Normies use it as a metaphor for THE MATRIX or whatever, don't fall for that.
Everyone thinks they understand the allegory of the cave until they understand it
What's wrong with the allegory of the cave?
Do you think you experience the world directly and your knowledge of it is perfect?
Plato actually withdrew from politics after socrates died. One of his pupils tried to get Plato to influence the king of sicily, who was the son of said pupils brother, in order to Platos ideas in practice. The king thought that Plato conspired to overthrow him. After having escaped from Sicily, Plato decided to not engage in politics.
Are the letters legit or are they imitations? i thought their veracity was dubious.
This
More like mobocracy amiright?
It was worse before they took away the right to vote from women.
No, it's actually an allegory for boipucci
Nietzsche rails on Socrates about this at the start of Twilight of the Idols
He was wrong.
Some of them certainly are, but there's lots of arguments about the Second and Seventh letters. I forget what the arguments about the Second letter are, but I recall it having stylistic problems that make it unlikely to be from Plato's hand. With the Seventh letter, everyone goes crazy over it, because in principle, if the rest of the letters are fake, then it's probable but not certain that it might be fake too. But it passes stylometric tests when compared to the so-called late dialogues (Timaeus, Critias, Philebus, Sophist, Statesman, Laws). Sometimes the arguments end up having to fudge up the methodology to show it as fake (one paper that focuses on stylometric tests compares it to the Apology, the reason being the similarity in length, and finds it too dissimilar, but the authors conveniently ignore that they're comparing a letter supposedly from Plato's late age with one of the first dialogues he wrote when he was a young man).
There's a compilation of lectures on the Seventh letter meant to show that it's a forgery by Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, but it's poor in argumentation. They both argue that, because a lot of ancient epistles tend to be forgeries attributed to a famous author or figure, that it's probable that it's a forgery, but they both seem to know that's not sufficient, so Burnyeat criticizes it on philosophical grounds, but he's prejudiced by modern analytic oriented readings such as Gregory Vlastos, while Frede makes a strangely poor argument that goes in two parts that he himself admits are the essential components of his argument against it being genuine, namely:
1) If it looks to contradict any of the work of the dialogues *before even getting into any issues of interpretation of those dialogues*, then it must be a forgery.
2) It looks to contradict something we supposedly know, that the move from writing the Republic to writing the Laws should indicate a change in Plato's views regarding politics, and the fact that a supposedly late letter seems to point more towards the Republic rather than the Laws for its views means that it contradicts Plato's own views late in his life, ergo it's fake.
1/2
A moment's reflection should indicate that this requires, against Frede's own argument, interpretation of the two dialogues in question, so while he wants to say that this is clear regardless of interpretation, it's necessary to have already interpreted both dialogues to actually reach his conclusion, and from there it's a matter of whether his interpretation of the relation of the two stands, the most obvious problem being the difference between writing a treatise in one's own name, and so presumably presenting one's own views, and writing dialogues where the author doesn't appear and never explicitly lays out their relation to the speeches of the dialogue, using a character known for his dissembling and irony as the main speaker. For what it's worth, Aristotle treats the teaching of the Republic in his Politics as though something about it still held in Plato's view, and the medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophers all treated the Laws as dealing with revelation's place in political life, and not as a replacement teaching for the Republic meant to be more practical than the Republic's teaching, as Frede and his associates would have it.
Nietzsche, whatever his polemics, has some very acute readings of Plato's writings. As a professor, he used to teach the Protaoras a good deal, and there are some analogues to his views on the will to power and the relation of power and knowledge in the Sophist and Statesman.