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243 collected words

Plato

Life dates uncertain

Athenian philosophical writer whose dialogues ask readers to examine arguments and speakers. Supplied archive attributions remain distinct from the checked reading edition.

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Life and writing

Plato wrote philosophical discussions that give questions a setting and different speakers. Socrates often leads an exchange, but the literary speaker should not simply be identified with Plato or treated as a transcript of the historical Socrates. A sentence gains meaning from the objection, example or response around it. The reference gives an uncertain ancient birth year; this profile keeps the archive’s exact life dates unset.

The linked Republic is Benjamin Jowett’s English translation. Book II considers education and the importance of beginnings; Book V examines opinion in relation to knowledge and ignorance. Follow a complete exchange and ask who proposes the claim and how it is tested. These passages offer context for the selected themes without making a supplied shortened quotation an authenticated extract from this edition.

Reading this voice

Begin with one exchange in Books II or V of The Republic, separating the dialogue from Jowett’s introductory analysis. The two selected contributor passages concern beginnings and opinion; their wording and source records remain unchanged. They are undated and independently unverified. A biography or related book cannot authenticate all 243 entries under this label or supply their composition dates. Precise life dates are not asserted here.

Subjects to explore

knowledgejusticelearningjudgement

Words to begin with

Quotations and sayings

07Undated
Here's something else I'd like your opinion about," I said. "If he went back underground and sat down again in the same spot, wouldn't the sudden transition from the sunlight mean that his eyes would be overwhelmed by darkness?" "Certainly," he replied. "Now, the process of adjustment would be quite long this time, and suppose that before his eyes had settled down and while he wasn't seeing well, he had once again to compete against those same old prisoners at identifying those shadows. Would he make a fool of himself? Wouldn't they say that he'd come back from his upward journey with his eyes ruined, and that it wasn't even worth trying to go up there? And would they -- if they could -- grab hold of anyone who tried to set them free and take them up there and kill him?
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17Undated
I shall try to persuade first the Rulers and soldiers, and then the rest of the community, that the upbringing and education we have given them was all something that happened to them only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth…. That is the story. Do you know of any way of making them believe it?” “Not in the first generation,” he said, “but you might succeed with the second, and later generations.
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24Undated
But this is not difficult, O Athenians! to escape death; but it is much more difficult to avoid depravity, for it runs swifter than death. And now I, being slow and aged, am overtaken by the slower of the two; but my accusers, being strong and active, have been overtaken by the swifter, wickedness. And now I depart, condemned by you to death; but they condemned by truth, as guilty of iniquity and injustice: and I abide my sentence, and so do they. These things, perhaps, ought so to be, and I think that they are for the best.
Plato / quote
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