This post is based on the notes I made watching identically named Artur Holmes lecture in his excellent History of Philosophy course.
Table of Contents
Socrates and Plato
The relationship between Plato and Socrates is a werid one, mostly because Socrates wrote nothing, yet his method and martyrdom had a huge influence on Plato.
We need to distinguish between the historical Socrates and “Plato’s Socrates”, which is a fully fictional character. In his early works, Plato mostly faithfully represents his teacher, but in the middle dialogues (like the Meno and Republic), Plato uses Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own ideas, such as Theory of Recollection, the Forms, and the ideal city.
Epistemology
It’s pointless to reason about unknown things, so even the early philosophers realized that we can’t move forward without defining knowledge in one way or another. All those “knowledge talks” are known as epistemology.
Minos
https://www.platonicfoundation.org/translation/minos/
In this rather short dialogue, we can see some distinctive reasoning patterns we now call a Socratic method. The conversation itself is not that impressive, but we can clearly see the attempts to dig deeper and understand the nature of law in good faith.
Children
If you know something, it is expected that you can share your knowledge with others, but most people would agree that many virtuous and knowledgeable people have terrible kids.
So, can virtue be taught? That’s an open question, I guess, but it’s the question Plato put into a spotlight, and he believed that the answer is no, at least not in a way a craft is passed on or a secret is shared. We’ll expand on that later, but Plato thought that virtue is something internal which can be “unlocked” under certain conditions.
Rhetoric vs Dialectic
It’s pretty hard to define and qualify knowledge. Plato distinguished between two methods of discourse: rhetoric and dialectic. While rhetoric can be relative and its only goal is to win an argument, dialectic is genuine truth-seeking, which is supposed to reach a universal conclusion. For Plato, rhetoric was not true knowledge at all, just a set of tricks you can employ to persuade others.
Innate Knowledge
This is one of the key Platonic ideas. Plato believed that we’re “imprisoned by being born”, which means that our bodies do not fully express our souls. We all have innate knowledge of the universe, but recalling it requires discipline.