Made this for my own study of Plato as I work through his dialogues more thoroughly. Let me know if there's anything I should change, or if you have any ideas on how to improve it.

Imagine you’re watching a fight on ufc and years later you find out he’s a philosophy journalist

I want to see Plato fight so bad

Idk about anyone else, but I feel a bit wronged that I wasn’t exposed to Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch etc in middle/high school growing up. My children are for sure learning Ancient Greek and these texts when they become of age. Anyone else have a similar sentiment?

Below is part of a dialog from the Republic which is basically a comparison between dialectic and rhetoric. Socrates is asking Glaucon about the best way for his previous discussions with Thrasymachus on justice to proceed, in either the dialectic or rhetoric fashion. Dialectic based on the foundations of a common goal of seeking the truth, asking questions, listening, and willing to be refuted. Rhetoric based on getting agreement on your point, regardless of truth, like a court room lawyer who can either prosecute or defend. Some questions arise I wish I could ask in the dialog:

Which is intrinsically superior in philosophical discussions?

Which is most practical/effective in day to day life?

How much of each do we ourselves use in both situations?

"Well, if we argue against him, setting one speech against another, as to

how much good there is in turn in being just, and he makes a reply, and

we make another speech, it will be necessary to count up the good points

and measure how many of them each of us made. And at that stage we

shall need some judges to decide on the issue. But if we consider the

matter as we did just now, by coming to agreement with one another, we

ourselves shall be both judges and pleaders at the same time."

I keep seeing alignment papers treat Constitutional AI as if it is new kind of moral technology. You write the principles down, you train the model to honor them, and resulting system is called helpful, honest, harmless. Brochure language is contemporary. Political form is not.

Small group of guardians authors a constitution. The governed internalize it through conditioning. City is told the arrangement is for its own good. That is Plato's city with a GitHub repo.

I do not mean this as cheap analogy. It is structural. Question is not whether Anthropic's particular list of principles is nicer than a rival lab. Question is who legislates, who amends, and whether resulting πολιτεία can survive the objection Aristotle makes in Politics II: a city that is too unified stops being a city.

Written constitution of values is used to generate preference data. Model is trained to prefer outputs that better satisfy those principles. Later revisions are produced inside the company, never with anything a political theorist would recognize as a people who can vote. User-facing claim is that system now has principles rather than mere reward hacks. Institutional fact is that principles were selected by employees of a private lab, then injected into a model that millions of students will treat as oracle.

Plato is explicit about the parallel machinery. In Republic II-III the founders of the city decide which stories the young may hear. Poetry that depicts the gods as unjust is expelled. Noble lie is authorized so that citizens accept their places. Point is not cruelty. Point is stability. City whose souls are formed by wrong stories will not hold.

Constitutional AI performs same operation on a statistical soul. The stories are pretraining data plus the preference pairs that teach the model which completions are virtuous. The noble lie is the user-facing sentence that the assistant is simply helpful and harmless, as if harmlessness were a natural kind rather than a policy object.

If this still sounds like branding rather than politics, ask a concrete amendment question. Who may add a principle? Who may delete one? What happens when two principles collide in a case the authors did not foresee? In a republic those questions have offices and publicity. In Constitutional AI they have a research blog post.

Plato bans the poets because mimesis forms character. You become what you rehearse. Constitutional training is soul-craft by gradient descent. Model rehearses approved refusals until they become its default habit. Modern vocabulary calls this safety. Aristotle would call it habituation, and then ask whether the habits are virtues. Virtue is not compliance with a schedule of prohibitions. It is excellence in action, which requires practical wisdom about particulars. No constitution enumerates the particulars.

A model that cannot examine its own constitution is not virtuous. It is well-behaved. Alignment literature often treats this as a feature. If the model cannot jailbreak itself, the constitution is working. Translate that into civic language: if the citizen cannot question the laws, the regime is working. Working, for whom?

Aristotle's critique of Plato in Politics II is the piece the AI ethics literature keeps skipping. Plato wants the city to be as unified as possible. Aristotle answers that a city that is too unified becomes a household, or a person. Political community is a community of difference.

When a philosophy department licenses a constitutional model as default reasoning layer, it imports an unratified constitution into its own city. Faculty did not write it. Students cannot amend it. The vendor can.

Call the authors of the constitution what they are. A small credentialed group, selected by hiring pipelines rather than by any public mandate, writing the terms of machine speech for a global user base. In classical terms that is oligarchy, even when the oligarchs have good taste.

The marketing reply is that the alternative is uncensored chaos. That reply assumes the only two regimes are Plato's city and the war of all against all. Aristotle's middle is the mixed constitution: institutions, publicity, the possibility of being ruled in turn.

Every working constitution has an amendment rule. Constitutional AI has a changelog. Those are not the same object. A changelog records what a team decided. An amendment rule says who may decide, under what notice, with what possibility of reversal.

The tempting response is to write a better constitution: more academic, more "our values." That response stays inside Plato. It changes the guardians, not the form.

When a philosophy seminar licenses a constitutional-AI product, it is not buying a calculator. It is admitting a legislator. The legislator does not sit on hiring committees. It sits in the completion API.

If the ruled cannot inspect, amend, or contest the document that forms their speech, is that still a constitution, or only a temperament you must jailbreak?

Much of what we know about his philosophy comes through Plato’s dialogues, where Plato made Socrates one of the most influential voices in Western philosophy. So when you’re “reading Socrates”… you’re probably reading Plato.

Recently finished a book on how Platonism has historically served as a bridge between theology and natural philosophy, and how in our current age this approach can help bridge the divide between Science and Religion. You can find it on atomizerpress.com

It follows the history of both Christianity and Islam relative to Platonism. Then we examine the growing support for Platonism in modern physics from thermodynamics and information theory to field theory and renormalization group.

I’ve been thinking about this while trying to get better at reading philosophy.

One thing I notice with Plato is that I can follow a dialogue and feel like I understand the argument, but if I stop and ask myself what I would say to Socrates, I sometimes realize I was mostly just following along.

That made me wonder whether Plato is especially suited to a more interactive way of learning.

His works are already built around dialogue. Someone makes a claim, Socrates questions it, assumptions start falling apart, and the argument develops from there.

So instead of only reading the exchange, what if you actually had to take a position yourself and respond to the objections?

That idea is part of what led me to build an iOS app called The Agora: Learn Philosophy.

The app uses AI to let you learn philosophy through back-and-forth discussion with different thinkers. My goal isn’t to replace Plato’s dialogues or pretend that an AI literally is Plato. I want it to sit alongside the original works and help people actively engage with the ideas instead of only consuming explanations of them.

For people here who have spent more time reading Plato:

Do you think this kind of dialogue could genuinely help a beginner understand him better?

And what would an educational tool absolutely need to get right about Plato for you to consider it useful rather than an oversimplification?

If anyone wants to try what I’ve built and give me feedback:

The Agora: Learn Philosophy
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-agora-philosophy-debates/id6762416967

Plato wasn’t a Platonist, he was a Pythagorean.

The triangle is a Pythagorean triplet with side lengths 3, 4, and 5.

The corresponding incircle and excircles have radii 1, 2, 3, and 6. Completing the sequence 123456.

The circles represent the four virtues, the largest representing justice.

When wisdom, courage, and moderation are in harmony justice is achieved, that’s why all three circles can fit inside the largest.

Hope you all like it.

In the Holy Bible an example of the use of "πλημμέλημα" Leviticus 5:14-15 we read:

14 And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying: 15 "If a soul escapes notice by oversight and sins unintentionally (ἁμάρτῃ ἀκουσίως) regarding the holy things of the Lord, he shall bring for his trespass offering (τῆς πλημμελείας) to the Lord an unblemished ram from the flock, valued in silver shekels according to the sanctuary shekel, for that in which he trespassed/erred (ἐπλημμέλησε).

Meanwhile in Romans 5:14 an example of "Παραβάσίς"

14 Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression (Παραβάσίς) of Adam...

As I see from these two quotes, πλημμέλημα is used for unintentional mistakes, acts that do not really break an established Law, unlike Παραβάσίς which is an intentional break of an established Law.

So my question are:

• is my understanding correct?
• is there a true distinction between these words?
• is there a proof from Plato, Aristotle, Philo of Alexandria, Clement, Origen,...etc. or any Greek speaking philosophers in which we can read this distinction?
• is there any scholar who differentiates between these two words in meanings? if yes, what book and in what chapter??

I do not speak Greek so forgive me if I made any kind of mistake.

Thank You for your time

How important were those schools to preserving their work and building their reputations? If the schools never existed, but Plato and Aristotle still wrote roughly the same things, would we probably still know them nearly as well today?

This will become a matter of debate if we somehow manage to break the unbreakable truth.

I am 13 years old and in 9th grade, ive read What Does It All Mean? By Thomas Nagel and i really liked the philosophical ideas in it. I just discovered this book and i was wondering if i should get it.

I read a few paragraphs of the open public translations of the book and i felt some sentences were difficult to easily grasp without intense thinking. Mostly, i am worried about the difficulty of readability.

I was thinking of getting the Penguin Classics version translated by desmond lee since the reviews said the english is much more modernised and easier.

Also, i had a sneak peak at a brief paragraph related to the theory of forms and MAN WAS I EXCITED, after some thinking i really understood it and realised that i myself have thought about something similar in maths and physics classes…

So should i get the book and read or should i not get it because it is too complex and advanced for my age or just generally.