RE: Thomism: Then & Now
October 28, 2021 at 1:09 am
(This post was last modified: October 28, 2021 at 2:03 am by emjay.)
(October 27, 2021 at 9:45 pm)Angrboda Wrote: I wish I enjoyed reading. *sigh*
If it's strictly the reading part you don't enjoy, I came across a lot of channels narrating philosophers on YouTube, and failing that there's always audiobooks if you're willing to pay (or if you can get your hands on a very early Kindle; some models convert text to speech... monotone maybe but I really wish I had one... all I have is a later model from after they got rid of that feature - presumably after they realised they could make money from selling audiobooks).
I've bought a few odd audiobooks and there's definitely something really pleasant about lying in a darkened room with your eyes closed and earphones in listening to a book being narrated to you... something like sensory deprivation that helps you get lost in it... and I think Plato would probably be very well suited to that, since it's already in dialogue/narrated form for most of it.
(October 27, 2021 at 9:20 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: I love Plato, emjay. The Republic is my favorite book of all time.
Right, cool. As to the Republic, it's definitely not what I was expecting (very few of them are... which is what is making them particularly exciting to read... that I really have no idea what they're going to be about before I read them... I'm just following the syllabus (which you've now added to ) of the particular playlist I'm watching on YouTube (the channel is Mark Rosenfeld (I think) if anyone's interested - he's an absolutely incredible teacher I'd say, really engaging both with his students and the text, as well as clearly very passionate about philosophy). Anyway I had no idea Republic was going to be about them imagining and building up from scratch the idea of the perfect state in order to analyse the concept of justice. So yeah, I'm very much looking forward to reading the rest of that and seeing how that pans out, not just for the interesting discussion on justice but also the historical interest of their idea of a perfect state.
Quote:Try the Symposium next. Avi Sharon translation is the best. Benjamin Jowitt doesn't do that one justice, but he's fine for the other works.
You really can get away with just reading Aristophanes' speech (because it's awesome) and Socrates' speech (because that has Diotima's ladder in it). But again, don't do the Jowett translation.
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll definitely add them to my 'syllabus' as I said ... but I'm hoping in the long run to read them all... so as soon as I get to the end of this playlist, try and find another, because it is good (to me) to have a discussion of sorts at the end of the reading to cement and clarify the ideas.
Quote:As far as this particular discussion, Plato will only take you so far. I think Aristotle shares some ideas about intelligibility with Plato, but they are quite different thinkers on a great deal of matters. But (IMO) Plato is the superior philosopher. The Apology is an amazing work. As are the Republic and Symposium. Those are my three faves. (Phaedrus is pretty cool too.)
It just feels familiar at this point to what we've been covering in this thread, but I haven't really analysed anything yet to see where those similarities lie - that sounds like a fun project for later.
For me, I can't really choose between them at this point; the dialogue form of Plato is definitely very engaging to put it mildly, but Aristotle is very clear and concise in his writing style too, so I appreciate both of them really, in different ways.
Quote:We can get a Plato thread going too if you want a sounding board for the stuff in any of those books. Bel is a Plato fan too.
Especially in Plato's early/middle works these are philosophical discussions he's not just shoving ideas at you to convince you of them. He's trying to get you to think. That's the beauty of Plato. We can still pick up those discussions today. AND he's an excellent writer. That counts for something too.
It's a nice idea to start a thread, but I'm not sure how much I could contribute to that, there's just so many layers to Plato and it's enough already to be reading them and watching these videos, but to analyse them as well would probably be too much for me (or at the very least I could only contribute in the same sort of capacity as I do in this thread, ie sporadically) since as Mark Rosenfeld (my YouTube 'teacher') said, and I agree with him completely, Plato is layered like an onion, constantly yielding new insights and connections. So yeah, sure if you want to start such a thread... maybe as an ongoing thing, since necroposting is now a thing of the past (I think)... but that's just fair warning of how much or little I might be able to contribute.