[BLANK_AUDIO] What kind of course is this? What should you get out of it? What's it all about? Behind the scenes, it's two courses in one. It's an eight week Coursera course for anyone who wants it. Hi, everyone on the internet, but if you're one of my students at NUS, that's National University of Singapore, the same videos slot into a larger 12 week framework. These videos are one ring in a two and a half ring circus. Hi, just NUS students. The eight week series, is six weeks on three dialogues by Plato, followed by two weeks. On contemporary versions of ideas from Plato. My NUS students get four more weeks of that. But I'll talk to them later in person. By the way if I ever seem confused about whether my course is eight weeks long or 12 weeks, well probably I am. Just ignore that, it's my problem not yours. But lets talk readings. If i'm lecturing about Euthyphro read the dialog entitled Euthyphro. If I'm lecturing about Meno, read Meno. Same goes for Republic, Book 1. You can get these reading's from my book, which is also my wife's. She's Belle Waring. She did the translations, I wrote the commentary. The book is available as a free pdf download from the course page as well as a paperback purchasable from Amazon. You man read any other edition of these dialogues you chose. I'm not going to reach out through the screen and force you to read our books. Wait, let me check on that. Hey Corsarah can I force them to read what I want? Can I reach through the screen and mess with their heads? No, evidently we haven't Implemented that feature yet. Okay, so good news you can do what you like. So back to the book. Since people have many different editions potentially. Let me mention that there is a universal system for referencing Plato called Stephanus pagination. Named after a French guy, who came out with a complete three-volume Plato way back in 1572. So, "Euthyphro," our reading for this week, runs from 2a to 16a, "Meno," from 70a to 100b, "Republic I" from 327a to 354c. When I quote a passage -- which I won't do that much -- I'll use the system, so you can chase it down. Whatever edition you've got handy. Pro tip, might seem you could just use these convenient numbers and omit the title. In fact that won't necessarily work because as I mentioned the edition was in three volumes. So passage 11A might be from Euthyphro from volume one, but it could be from Philabus from volume two. Enough about that. If you care, you'll figure it out. One last word about Plato editions. This is less a pro tip than a pet peeve. Or maybe it's just something funny I like to tell jokes about. In order for a work to be public domain, the author has to be dead for a while. Plato qualifies easily. But probably your ancient Greek is just a bit rusty. Am I right? So if you don't like my wife's translation, or you want the text of some other dialogue, and you're cheap, and you need instant gratification because the internet has trained you well. You need a long dead translator. The name Jowett comes up a lot. Benjamin Jowett died 1893. Check. Translated all of Plato, check, result. Jouwit rules the English language Plato internet. To a very considerable degree. Here's the thing. Jouwit's kind of Victorian. That's not his fault, what was he supposed to do about it? Kill Queen Victoria? She outlived him! By almost a decade. Jouwit doesn't make Plato sound like Scrooge or anything crazy, he won't make you say I love ancient Athens, it reminds me of 19th century London fog and Christmas. But word to the wise, when you're reading an old translation, try not to conflate the oldness of the English with the oldness of the author, Plato, in this case. If you see what I mean, okay. Moving right along, my recommended readings. For the six Plato weeks include commentary bits from my bit. My book contains stuff I'm not lecturing about. And my lectures contain stuff not in the book. My lectures are never just me reading stuff from my book that would be very boring. But a lot of lectures consist of me saying things I say in the book just in a different way. So, take the reading list in whatever way works for you. If you got the lectures just fine, then maybe you should treat the recommendations more like a warning label. You don't need to read these bits, you got it. On the other hand, if the lecture was very confusing, maybe those are exactly the bits you need to get the same information, just in a different way. Now, some thoughts about what you can expect to get out of this course. When I was preparing, and learning how Coursera works, I was told I should distinguish learning outcomes, that's stuff you can measure or test, from learning objectives. That's the cloudy stuff that no one can prove you didn't actually do if you fail. And I was like, oh, I'll take the cloudy one, I'm a philosopher. But apparently I'm supposed to have both. It reminds me of that bit from Ghostbusters, movie from the 80's, probably you're too young to remember, there's one scene where Ray says to Vinkman, you've never been out of college, you don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results. Or outcomes as they're not called. So outcomes it is. If you take my course, you'll read Plato. A predictable outcome should be learning facts about him, his ideas, arguments, plus historical stuff. But why expend non-trivial storage capacity in your precious brain Just mirroring Plato's Wikipedia page in part. You could look that stuff up on your phone if you need it. Alright, you got me. The real learning outcome is that I will make you clever. Maybe. How do I measure clever as a through put product? Well, this part isn't hammered out, as of this filming, but I have banks of MCQ questions about these Plato texts, and I've used them to test my students over the years. So we'll set up some quizzes, just self assessment, mind you. What are they like, these MCQ questions? They're tricky reading and informal reasoning questions. The substance is our readings but in form these questions are a lot like the LSAT if you know what it is. It's the Law School Admissions Test for students wanting to attend law school in the U.S. If you practice taking my Plato test I'll bet you do better on the LSAT's. I'll make you clever. For at least that value of clever. And now, those of you out there who know a bit of Plato already, are appreciating the cruel irony. In this dialogues, Socrates often criticizes those he calls Sophists. That's Greek for half way between a wise man and a wise guy. Guys who promise to make you clever. In Meno, we meet Meno who's the student of a guy named Gorgias who promises to make you a clever speaker if you pay him. That was law school before they invented law school. How ironic that you would read Plato against the Sophists in order to learn to be a Sophist. That's comedy. In my defense, I didn't say it was a good learning outcome. Just an outcome. It's a Coursera loophole. If it weren't for bad learning outcomes, some people would have no learning outcomes at all. The ancient Athenians took a vote, and decided Socrates' learning outcomes were Corrupting the youth and introducing strange gods into the city. Socrates argued otherwise. Clearly there is room for dispute, even though learning outcomes are supposed to be fairly definite. Law school is a fine option for some people, by the way. But seriously, the puzzle here is not that I'm trying to teach you to be clever, which is not a bad thing It's that being clever is not necessarily a philosophical thing. Besides helping you get into law school, maybe, what's the philosophical outcome here? Let me list one, before moving on to the cloudy stuff. Learning objectives. Which is where most of the silver linings are to be found. Taking these pesky quizzes of mine will be philosophically instructive in one very Socratic way. Socrates teaches the wisdom of knowing what you don't know. You all know English and have a basic ability to read and reason. I assume you do, or you're probably in the wrong place, but these quizzes are hard. And most of you will get a lot of the questions wrong. If you try. The next video is largely how to read Plato. I'm going to explain how it's his fault. He makes it, he makes your life hard. If you want to blame someone you can blame him. But for now lets blame yourself just a little bit. If you take one of my quizzes, and don't absolutely ace it then that's part of the explanation of why this stuff is hard. You aren't necessarily a bad reader, but you could be a lot better. Food for thought. Moving right along. Being good with words is all well and good, but I could have taught you to be fast on your verbal feet without teaching any Plato whatsoever. But, but it's all footnotes to Plato. You said so. You can't skip Plato. Well actually you can. Lots of Philosophy 101 classes don't teach Plato, although lots do. More generally, let's flip that thought around. If Plato's philosophy is so important that it's everywhere. Then you can get it anywhere. Conclusion, you don't need to study Plato, read the internet. There's Plato in it! Read wikipedia, read the newspaper. In this media saturated world of ours, the only way to keep Plato out. Is to close your eyes, and then you're trapped inside your own mind, with thoughts. Plato's in there too. So who needs Plato? I mean, his actual dialogues, the written down stuff. As opposed to his diffuse intellectual legacy. The fish, so they say, is the last one to know it's in water. Even so, that doesn't mean you should offer fish a glass of water. Get it? You're the fish, Plato is the water. Time for a quiz. [BLANK_AUDIO] Did the professor just compare me to a fish? A. Yes. B. No. That was just a dream. The answer was A, yes. I compared you to a fish. Sorry, I just figured you were probably falling asleep by that point. Are you awake now? Good. Time for another quiz. I'm a fish? Hey, just calm down. Read your Plato, but think. If this stuff is as important as people say, it must be the case that you could get it elsewhere. B. You can lead a fish to water, but you can't make it drink. C. Panic! This stuff is way too hard. I'll accept either answer A or B. They're both true. Okay. Let me start over and be practical about it this time. If I try to tell you what philosophical thing you should get out of Plato as opposed to just getting cleverer in a law school sort of way. It's hard for me to say, because it's really on you to say. It's on you to find some point. Pick a point. Plato is like a crossroads where different ways of thinking collide before heading off in their own directions. Not just different conclusions, different styles of thinking. He can seem narrow like any crowded intersection, especially after a bad collision, but by implication he's headed out on all these roads. All these diverse intellectually objectives are in here in Plato, at least potentially. I hope you see one at least one that looks interesting. If you don't pick at least one to be yours, there's a danger Plato will be boring. Your first learning objective is not being bored. Oh, that's easy for you to say, you say. A little help over here. Okay. You've seen my little cartoon of the two Greek guys playing some kind of checkers game. It's on the cover of my book. I realize my cartooning skills are minimal. Even so, this Plato stuff is so easy to be visually vivid about that I have fun all the same. A personal story, I was checking out the competition here on Coursera and one class I took Was Dino 101, I was jealous. They get to show people dinosaurs. How can I possibly compete? Then I came to my senses. Plato is interesting in part, because he's part of the golden age of ancient Athens. Visual art, architecture, religion, myths, drama, history, philosophy, Hollywood movies. Well they came later but they helped. What could be more exciting? Well yeah, if they had dinosaurs sure. But you can't have everything kid. As I was saying, Plato is a glorious window into all that. I won't be talking about all that. Except a little bit, this isn't Golden age of Athens 101, but some people who love Plato love that. They get into the cultural and historical particularity, the ancient Greekness of what we will be reading. And that's fine. And we'll do a bit of that to start you down that path. If that's your path. But other people read Plato differently, abstractly, as if he weren't Greek, but just human. As if he died only yesterday, or never died at all. As if he were just an idea, not a person at all. Let's stick with the chess analogy. The ancient Greeks didn't have chess. But chess is kind of like philosophy. It's hard, it's as technical as you like, and no one knows how to win. Every known gambit can be countered in some way. So winning is a fine learning objective in chess, but not a learning outcome. The only stuff you can definitely learn are standard gambit and standard defense. Which are abstract timeless structures. Sure, the chess board looks like a cluttered place with lots of carved bits of wood. Maybe your pieces are carved to look like ancient Greek hoplites. Maybe that appeals to your fantasies about weaponry, or your sense of the glory, that was ancient Athens. That's fine, but it's not essential. I hope to make you happy with the philosophy equivalent of some clever chess moves, and I hope to make you annoyed by some annoying ones, maybe smug about some dumb ones that some other idiot made, but I leave it to you to judge which are which. I hope you internalize a sense for all this. Because in answer to be earlier question, why not just ask Wikipedia if you ever need to know some fact about Plato. The answer is that certain patterns of thinking need to be at your mental fingertips. Not just your Google fingertips. Okay. That's it for this video. Next up. More about how to read Plato and important facts about Plato and Socrates. [BLANK_AUDIO]
