New Course: Six Key Platonic Dialogues

an 8-week online course on great ideas of Plato, starting March 29

Our newest online course offering in the Study With Sadler Academy is an eight week class in which we will work though a set of Plato’s dialogues. Anyone who has previously watched my video providing advice about self-directed study of Plato will recognize the sequence of dialogues as those I view as a particularly good start fpr studying Plato’s philosophy.

These dialogues are the Ion, Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. The last four of those are often anthologized as the “last days of Socrates” since they center around his trial and execution in Athens, charged with impiety and corrupting the young.

Those dialogues range over a number of other key topics and teachings, including Socrates’ own mission, the nature of life and death, the relation between body and soul, which people have knowledge, and the nature of the virtues, among others. Plato’s shortest dialogue, the Ion, gives us a glimpse of Socrates approach in discussion with an interpreter of poetry. The Meno further thematizes the “Socratic method” and its results, introduces the famous “doctrine of recollection”, and attempts to determine what virtue is.

Class sessions are scheduled for 90 minutes over the course of eight Saturdays, meeting at 9 AM Central Time, starting March 29, and running to Saturday, May 17. We meet using Zoom, and we record each of the class sessions, so that students can go back over them at their leisure, or watch them if they happen to miss the class. Each class session consists of some lecture, lots of discussion, examining examples and arguments, and answering any questions of confusions raised by the dialogues.

During each week of the class, I also provide students with downloadable handouts on the text assigned for that week, most of them previously developed for students when I have taught these dialogues in the past.

Here’s the course of our studies and the main topics we will be exploring:

Week 1 – Introduction and the Ion

• Platonic dialogues as philosophical genre

• Productive ways to read Platonic dialogues

• The notion of “speaking well” on matters

• Different disciplines and subject-matters

• Whether poets or interpreters have knowledge

• Enthusiasm and the metaphor of the magnet

Week 2 – the Meno

• Attempts to define by examples

• Whether or not virtue can be defined

• Priorities among the virtues and goods

• Effects of Socratic questioning

• The “Meno paradox” about knowledge

Week 3 – the Meno continued

• Learning as recollection

• The geometric proof and the servant boy

• Whether politicians have knowledge

• Knowledge and right opinion

• Anytus’ threat against Socrates

Week 4 – the Euthyphro

• Euthyphro’s pious prosecution

• Whether piety can be defined

• What gods and humans disagree over

• The “Euthyphro dilemma”

• Piety construed as service of gods

Week 5 – the Apology

• Socrates’ intellectual origin story

• Socrates older accusers

• Addressing charges against Socrates

• Socrates as a gadfly to Athens

• Why death could be a good thing

Week 6 – the Crito

• Crito’s proposal to save Socrates

• Socrates reminder about past principles

• The many vs the wise

• Personification of the Laws

• The Laws’ argument

Week 7 – the Phaedo

• Narrative framework of the dialogue

• The danger of misology

• The body as prison to the soul

• Philosophical temperance and courage

• Suicide’s ethical status

Week 8 – the Phaedo continued

• Socrates’ arguments for immortality of the soul

• Whether the soul is a harmony of the body

• Whether the soul can wear out

• The myth of the afterlife

If you’d like to hear me discussing this upcoming class, you might enjoy watching this explanatory video. If you’d like to see the course of study in a bit more detail, or to enroll in the class, feel free to go right on to the class site.

To bring this to a close, I’ll add that these are some really wonderful philosophical texts some of which I’ve been reading for over 30 years and teaching for over 25. Each time I go through them again, I rediscover why I found them fascinating in the first place. I very much enjoy leading learners through them, and I’m looking forward to doing that once more later on this month. Perhaps you’d like to join me as we work through them week by week!