Classical Civilisation A-Level: Love and Relationships - Plato Critics

Waterfield

one part of us sympathises with Alcibiades and his sorry tale of unrequited love; but then we remember that Socrates is meant to be our ideal and we disapprove of Alcibiades being so stubbornly erotic

Dodds

Plato expresses with some clarity that sexual gratification distracts from the focus on recollection, but Socrates does not wholly condemn couples who occasionally give in to their sexual urges

Jiminez

Diotima engages with the previous speeches, and their parts contribute to her whole speech

C.D. Reeve

[Socrates] a man so powerfully erotic that he turned the conventional world of love upside down by seeming to be a lover (erastes), while really establishing himself as a beloved boy (eromenos) instead

Scheller

love itself... brings about the continuous emergence of ever-higher value in the object - just as if it were streaming out from the object of its own accord, without any exertion (even of wishing) on the part of the lover

Burton

in the Phaedrus Plato emphasises the relationship that love has to the divine and hence to the eternal and infinite, in the Symposium he emphasises more the relationship that it has to the practice of philosophy, the search for happiness, and the contemplation of truth

G.R.F. Ferrari

Plato does not have a comprehensive theory of love... he diverts certain opinions about love to his own peculiarly philosophic ends... [he constructs] a bridge between love and philosophy

Mosely

Eros is common desire that seeks transcendental beauty