platonic dialogues

meno

• Central Question: “Can virtue be taught?”

• Meno’s Paradox: If you don’t know what something is, how do you search for it?

• Anamnesis: Demonstrated by the geometry puzzle with Meno’s slave. Suggests the soul recalls eternal truths.

• Purpose of the Geometrical Shape: To show that knowledge can be “drawn out” rather than taught.

• Conclusion: Ends in aporia, but suggests virtue might come from “right opinion” or divine dispensation if not teachable.

Euthyphro

• Topic: Definition of piety.

• Central Dilemma: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it’s pious, or is it pious because the gods love it?”

• Implications for divine command theory vs. moral objectivism.

apology

• Socrates’s defense speech at his trial.

• Accused of corrupting the youth and impiety.

• Explains his mission from the Oracle, why he questions people.

• He would rather die than give up philosophizing.

crito

• Socrates in prison; Crito urges escape.

• Socrates refuses on moral grounds: obeying the law is crucial for justice.

• Argues that fleeing would break his implicit contract with Athens.

phaedo (socrates’s death)

• Focuses on immortality of the soul and Socrates’s final moments before hemlock.

• Key Arguments:

  1. Opposites: Life and death generate each other.

  2. Recollection (Equality): We recognize “equal” things in the world only by recalling the perfect Form of Equality from before birth.

  3. Affinity: The soul is more like the eternal, invisible realm of Forms, while the body is mortal and perishable.

• Concludes that the soul is separable and survives death.

REPUBLIC

• Main Themes: Justice, ideal state, philosopher-king, education, structure of society.

• Cephalus/Polemarchus: Conventional views of justice.

• Thrasymachus: “Justice is the advantage of the stronger”—might makes right.

• Glaucon’s Ring of Gyges: If you had a ring granting invisibility, would you stay just? Suggests people are just out of fear of consequences.

• Analogy of the Ship: The captain = the ignorant majority; the navigator (philosopher) truly knows how to direct the ship (society).

  • ruled by those who know

allegory of the cave

• Prisoners see only shadows (illusions).

• One prisoner escapes, sees real objects, and then the sun (the Form of the Good).

• Symbolizes the philosopher’s journey from ignorance to knowledge, returning to educate others.

theastetus

• Explores “What is knowledge?”

• Considers definitions: “Knowledge is perception,” “Knowledge is true judgment,” “Knowledge is true judgment with an account/logos.”

• Ends in aporia but lays groundwork for the later idea of knowledge as “justified true belief.”

timaeus

• Plato’s cosmology and explanation of the universe’s origin.

• The Demiurge: A benevolent “divine craftsman” who shapes the cosmos after the eternal Forms.

• Matter is chaotic; the Demiurge imposes rational order on it.