Now I'm going to give you the basics on Plato and Socrates and dialogues. Well, squeezing Euthyphro in around the edges. Overall, I give advice about how to read Plato to get more out of it. Plato's dates, born 427 BC. Died 347 BC. Plato writes dialogues in which he employs his dead teacher, Socrates, as a mouthpiece or sock puppet, call it what you will. Socrates, born 470 BC, died 399 BC. Birth date gets a question mark, but we know he died in 399 BC. He was tried and convicted and executed in Athens for doing what he did. I'll say more about that by the end of the lesson, but let's worry about something else first. Socrates never wrote anything. That first fact, Plato writes dialogues about Socrates, plus the second, Socrates doesn't write anything, equals trouble. Sometimes these dialogues are called Platonic dialogues. Sometimes Socratic dialogues. No harm in having two names for one thing, but this is a case of people being a bit unsure what they're getting. When my students write papers about Plato, they can get stuck right out of the gate. Should I write Plato argues, because he did the writing? Or Socrates argues, because he's the one doing the arguing on the page. The answer is, it depends. Sometimes it's obvious what you should say but sometimes what you should say depends on things that just aren't obvious at all. Because there's no answer. Anyway, scholars disagree. Let's back up a little bit. What's a dialogue? It's a debate or talk with at least two sides. In a literary sense it's that. Just written down. Sort of a cross between a play and a problem set, I always say. Alright, who are these people in the dialogue? Were they real? Yes, Plato and Socrates were real. So were all the interlocutors. That's a fancy word for debating partners. Not for all of Plato's dialogues, but at least for our three. These guys really lived in Athens, and were contemporaries of Socrates. Does that mean these dialogues are true, non-fiction reports of things that were said in Athens? No. It's surely at least semi-fictional. Probably the details are mostly fictional. Well let's back up again. Why write dialogues rather than, I dunno, essays? Textbook? Maybe a poem, a letter? That's a tough one, but I'll try to get back to it before this lesson's done. Let's back up even further. You can think of Plato's complete works, that's a big fat book. It's like one of those Russian dolls, the matryoshka dolls, you know what I'm talking about. You crack em open and you find, more dolls! In this case, you crack open Plato, and you find mostly, Socrates. He is the substance here, Plato is just this shell to keep Socrates safe and preserved for posterity. Maybe. But it's more complicated. There's a lot of little dolls in here. A lot of little characters in the dialogue. You will meet them. It might turn out that this ancient Greek Russian doll is a lot bigger on the inside than the outside. You see here on the map I've put all the little characters out to show you where they're from. So you see, it's not just Athens, or even just Greece, they're from all over the Greek world. From Italy, practically to the Black Sea. Wait, how is the Greek world bigger than Greece? Well, you were Greek if you spoke Greek, and Greeks spread all over the Mediterranean. I'm not going to give you the full history, but philosophically, the cosmopolitanism of the world of Plato's dialogues is going to be important to us. But let's back up again. Maybe this is all wrong. Maybe this is all Plato, and he's just hiding behind a Socrates mask. All that is profound, wears a mask. The German philosopher, Fredrick Nietzche, said that. Obviously, he got by with a fabulous mustache. So we can't tell whether he's cracking a smile back there. What did he mean? Hey, let's make it a quiz. All that is profound wears a mask. What do you suppose that means? Check all that apply. A, any deep truth will be a hidden truth. Otherwise, we wouldn't call it profound. We'd call it obvious. B, Any deep truth will be two-sided. Will be contradictory, or invite contradiction. Hence the two faces. C, Any deep truth will go against what most people think. So if you think deeply, you might want to consider wearing a mask unless you want people to look at you like you're weird. So what's the answer? I have to go with all of the above. Does that go for Plato too? Your guess is as good as mine. I think I'd guess yes. Here's a twist. Plato wasn't the only one writing Socratic dialogues, during the generation after his teacher was executed. It was a minor literary genre. So Socrates said, may have some of the same problems as Confucius taught, in the Chinese tradition. This sort of thing isn't necessarily false reporting, it's just, maybe conventional as a point of literary modesty, to attribute your own thoughts to The Master. Let me give you a standard picture, something you can hold on to. Scholars date Plato's dialogues as early, middle. And like, meaning just what you think. Actually, not quite but I'm not going to go into that. Here is a standard hypothesis based on the standard dating. The early stuff written while Plato was fairly young is probably a fairly accurate portrait of what Socrates really taught. Or any way, what he was really like. Middle Plato, probably a mix. Plato is coming into his own as a thinker now. So he's mixing in ideas that Socrates never had. Late Plato, pure Plato. Even if he keeps the Socratic mask around for old time's sake. Or for whatever masks are good for. What sorts of philosophical changes are these supposed to be over time? Well, keeping it very simple, Socrates himself didn't have positive views, or not many, according to the standard picture. His philosophy was negative. He took other people's ethical views apart. He didn't build up out of the rubble. Thus, the early dialogues are negative, and purely concerned with ethics. Plato himself starts to build out of the rubble, starting in the middle dialogues. His philosophy of the forms or the ideas, those words have to be capitalized because they're technical. Republic, this book republic, is a blueprint for an ideal state. That's pretty positive. Like I said, I'm oversimplifying, and some scholars don't buy it, but you can assume it, and no one will look at you like you're too weird, if that matters to you. Our dialogues are early, Euthyphro or early to middle, that's Meno and Republic Book One. So, a non-socially embarrassing guess, is that we are getting some real Socrates, especially in Euthyphro. But, mixed in with things, Plato things, that Socrates maybe never thought. [BLANK_AUDIO]
