Plato's Phaedrus
Intro to Ancient Philosophy:
Renowned philosopher A.N. Whitehead notoriously said that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Indeed, ideas that many of us might take for granted like the soul, goodness, consciousness, and the natural world are overwhelmingly informed by ancient philosophy. This academic 5-session evening course will survey the philosophy of Plato via a focused examination of one of Plato’s most famous, quirky, and beloved dialogues: The Phaedrus.
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St. Paul Community Education: Mondays 7:00- 8:30 PM, 4/10, 4/16, 4/24, 5/1, 5/8
**ENROLLMENT OPEN NOW. Class caps at 15 students*
This course will be broken down into 5 sessions. Sessions will open with a lecture on the days material given by the instructor followed by structured Socratic discussions. No prior experience in philosophy is required. Beginners are not only welcome but encouraged.
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Session 1: Introduction to Platonism
This session will introduce students to reading ancient philosophical texts and explore the history of Platonism in Ancient Greece and Rome. We will discuss how to read a dialogue, how to parse the Platonic from the Socratic, how to know when Plato is joking (which occurs often!), and what to do when we inevitably get stuck. Finally, we will introduce ourselves to our main text– The Phaedrus– and work through the first section together in preparation for the following week.
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Session 2: Socratic Dialogue and the Theory of Recollection
In this session, we will discuss the first section of Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates and Phaedrus playfully consider the nature of love in a rousing back-and-forth, characteristic of Socratic dialectic. Why might Socrates insist that he has more to learn from Phaedrus reading a speech out loud, rather than Socrates simply reading it himself? From this, we will move to our first major tenet of Platonism: The Theory of Recollection, which holds that the human soul already has knowledge of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
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Session 3: The Soul
After establishing that madness can be a special gift given by the gods, Socrates offers us his second speech on the nature of love. Key to this speech is the idea of the soul: an immortal and immaterial part of our ontology. This week, we will dive into one of Plato’s proofs for the immortality of the soul and consider the iconic image of the rational charioteer with his spirited and passionate horses.
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Session 4: The Theory of Forms
Plato’s alleged Theory of Forms remains one of the most contested, lively, and paradigmatic elements of Platonic philosophy. What is a Form? How do they inform our embodied lives, and how do we know which Forms there are? Here, we will attempt to elucidate Plato’s ToF via Socrates’ animated journey of the soul traveling through the cosmos.
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Session 5: Rhetoric and Myth
Earlier in the dialogue, Plato establishes the realm of the Forms to be “the place beyond heaven– none of our earthly poets has ever sung or will sing its praises enough!” (247c) and notes that poets and myth writers are much lower souls than philosophers. Yet, after a lengthy discussion of rhetoric, Plato ends the dialogue with a myth. Today, we will ask: What is the role of classical Greek religion in Platonic philosophy? How can myth help us understand Truth, and how does it fall short? We will conclude with some larger thoughts on Platonic philosophy and its importance in the classical canon.
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The required text for the course is Plato's Phaedrus. Online, free versions of The Phaedrus can be accessed at the links below. Hard copies can be purchased at local bookstores. Occasionally there will be opportunities for supplemental reading; these can also be accessed by clicking "More Texts" or by visiting the "Blog" tab.
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