30 January 2013 - PLATO

PLATO

(429–347 B.C.E.) 

 G'day guys,

Today I introduce a man who is well gone, but a man who left us much - Plato. Who was he?


Plato is, by any reckoning, one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy. An Athenian citizen of high status, he displays in his works his absorption in the political events and intellectual movements of his time, but the questions he raises are so profound and the strategies he uses for tackling them so richly suggestive and provocative that educated readers of nearly every period have in some way been influenced by him, and in practically every age there have been philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some important respects.



He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word“philosopher” should be applied. But he was so self-conscious about how philosophy should be conceived, and what its scope and ambitions properly are, and he so transformed the intellectual currents with which he grappled, that the subject of philosophy, as it is often conceived—a rigorous and systematic examination of ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological issues, armed with a distinctive method—can be called his invention. Few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank.


There is another feature of Plato's writings that makes him distinctive among the great philosophers and colors our experience of him as an author. Nearly everything he wrote takes the form of a dialogue. (There is one striking exception: his Apology, which purports to be the speech that Socrates gave in his defense—the Greek word apologia means “defense”—when, in 399, he was legally charged and convicted of the crime of impiety. However, even there, Socrates is presented at one point addressing questions of a philosophical character to his accuser, Meletus, and responding to them. 

In addition, since antiquity, a collection of 13 letters has been included among his collected works, but their authenticity as compositions of Plato is not universally accepted among scholars, and many or most of them are almost certainly not his. Most of them purport to be the outcome of his involvement in the politics of Syracuse, a heavily populated Greek city located in Sicily and ruled by tyrants.)

NOTABLE QUOTES FROM PLATO:

People

You can  discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.

All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue.

 Success and Effort

Apply  yourself both now and in the next life.

Without effort, you cannot be prosperous.

Though the land be good, you cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation.

Excellence

Better a  little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.

All  things will be produced in superior quantity and quality, and with greater ease, when each man works at a single occupation, in accordance with his natural gifts, and at the right moment, without meddling with anything else.

Mental Thoughts

For a man  to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.

Good Actions

Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.

Hard Work

I never  did anything worth doing by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.

Clancy's comment: Always liked reading quotes. Ever notice that the most meaningful are usually the briefest?
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