All 50 Uses
Plato
in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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- We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on.†
Part 1 *Plato = ancient Athenian philosopher who did much to influence Western thinking (428-347 BC)
- Plato vilified them in all his works to grind an axe of his own and since what we know about them is almost entirely from Plato they're unique in that they've stood condemned throughout history without ever having their side of the story told.†
Part 2
- Plato vilified them in all his works to grind an axe of his own and since what we know about them is almost entirely from Plato they're unique in that they've stood condemned throughout history without ever having their side of the story told.†
Part 2
- Whitehead's statement that all philosophy is nothing but "footnotes to Plato" can be well supported.†
Part 4
- He consistently harked back to St. Thomas Aquinas, who had taken Plato and Aristotle and made them part of his medieval synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian faith.†
Part 4
- It's the mode of discourse of Socrates in the Dialogues of Plato.†
Part 4
- Plato believed the dialectic was the sole method by which the truth was arrived at.†
Part 4
- Aristotle attacked this belief, saying that the dialectic was only suitable for some purposes...to enquire into men's beliefs, to arrive at truths about eternal forms of things, known as Ideas, which were fixed and unchanging and constituted reality for Plato.†
Part 4
- Thus the dethronement of dialectic from what Socrates and Plato held it to be was absolutely essential for Aristotle, and "dialectic" was and still is a fulcrum word.†
Part 4
- Phaedrus guessed that Aristotle's diminution of dialectic, from Plato's sole method of arriving at truth to a "counterpart of rhetoric," might be as infuriating to modern Platonists as it would have been to Plato.†
Part 4
- Phaedrus guessed that Aristotle's diminution of dialectic, from Plato's sole method of arriving at truth to a "counterpart of rhetoric," might be as infuriating to modern Platonists as it would have been to Plato.†
Part 4
- The person to clear all this up, of course, was Plato, and fortunately he was the next to appear at the round table with the crack running across the middle in the dim dreary room across from the hospital building in South Chicago.†
Part 4
- People who can't stand Aristotle's endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato's soaring generalities.†
Part 4
- People who can't stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle.†
Part 4
- Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the "one."†
Part 4
- I myself am pretty much Aristotelian in this sense, preferring to find the Buddha in the quality of the facts around me, but Phaedrus was clearly a Platonist by temperament and when the classes shifted to Plato he was greatly relieved.†
Part 4
- His Quality and Plato's Good were so similar that if it hadn't been for some notes Phaedrus left I might have thought they were identical.†
Part 4
- The course in the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was not concerned with Plato's notion of the Good, however; it was concerned with Plato's notion of rhetoric.†
Part 4
- The course in the Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was not concerned with Plato's notion of the Good, however; it was concerned with Plato's notion of rhetoric.†
Part 4
- Rhetoric, Plato spells out very clearly, is in no way connected with the Good; rhetoric is "the Bad."†
Part 4
- The people Plato hates most, next to tyrants, are rhetoricians.†
Part 4
- The next day he is at the library waiting for it to open and when it does he begins to read furiously, back behind Plato for the first time, into what little is known of those rhetoricians he so despised.†
Part 4
- Plato's condemnation of the Sophists is one which many scholars have already taken with great misgivings.†
Part 4
- The Chairman of the committee himself has suggested that critics who are not certain what Plato meant should be equally uncertain of what Socrates' antagonists in the dialogues meant.†
Part 4
- When it is known that Plato put his own words in Socrates' mouth (Aristotle says this) there should be no reason to doubt that he could have put his own words into other mouths too.†
Part 4
- The name Sophist was even applied without disparagement to Socrates and Plato themselves.†
Part 4
- It has even been suggested by some later historians that the reason Plato hated the Sophists so was that they could not compare with his master, Socrates, who was in actuality the greatest Sophist of them all.†
Part 4
- What was Plato's real purpose in this?†
Part 4
- Phaedrus reads further and further into pre-Socratic Greek thought to find out, and eventually comes to the view that Plato's hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of man.†
Part 4
- To Phaedrus, this backlight from the conflict between the Sophists and the Cosmologists adds an entirely new dimension to the Dialogues of Plato.†
Part 4
- Now Plato's hatred of the Sophists makes sense.†
Part 4
- Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people...there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores.†
Part 4
- The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it.†
Part 4
- The one thing that doesn't fit what he says and what Plato said about the Sophists is their profession of teaching virtue.†
Part 4
- "When we meet areté in Plato," he said, "we translate it 'virtue' and consequently miss all the flavour of it.†
Part 4
- The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone.†
Part 4
- Plato hadn't tried to destroy areté.†
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- That was why the Quality that Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato's Good.†
Part 4
- Plato's Good was taken from the rhetoricians.†
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- The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all.†
Part 4
- Why had Plato done this?†
Part 4
- Phaedrus saw Plato's philosophy as a result of two syntheses.†
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- In order to win the battle for Truth in which areté is subordinate, against his enemies who would teach areté in which truth is subordinate, Plato must first resolve the internal conflict among the Truth-believers.†
Part 4
- This is why Plato finds it necessary to separate, for example, "horseness" from "horse" and say that horseness is real and fixed and true and unmoving, while the horse is a mere, unimportant, transitory phenomenon.†
Part 4
- Plato's second synthesis is the incorporation of the Sophists' areté into this dichotomy of Ideas and Appearance.†
Part 4
- But in his attempt to unite the Good and the True by making the Good the highest Idea of all, Plato is nevertheless usurping areté's place with dialectically determined truth.†
Part 4
- Aristotle felt that the mortal horse of Appearance which ate grass and took people places and gave birth to little horses deserved far more attention than Plato was giving it.†
Part 4
- And today in those few Universities that bother to teach classic ethics anymore, students, following the lead of Aristotle and Plato, endlessly play around with the question that in ancient Greece never needed to be asked: "What is the Good?†
Part 4
- But one soon learns that this bad speech is simply a setup, an easy act for Socrates to follow with a much better speech of his own, and following that with a still better speech, one of the finest in all the Dialogues of Plato.†
Part 4
- Plato often names Socrates' foils for characteristics of their personality.†
Part 4
Definitions:
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(1)
(Plato) ancient Athenian philosopher who did much to influence Western thinking; pupil of Socrates; teacher of Aristotle (428-347 BC)A memory trick to remember the relationships between Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and Alexander the Great is to put them in reverse alphabetical order: Socrates taught Plato who taught Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great.
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)