[HN Gopher] Was He Apollo's Son?: Review of Plato of Athens
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       Was He Apollo's Son?: Review of Plato of Athens
        
       Author : drdee
       Score  : 26 points
       Date   : 2023-06-06 05:26 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
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       | aputsiak wrote:
       | I for one adore and cherish the works of Plato, and in general
       | put him amongst the most important persons to have lived. Imaging
       | that he could have been overseen, forgotten, or ridiculed fully,
       | perhaps the proper question is: What can I, you, and we
       | accomplish to remedy a norm where money & power override truth,
       | where false beliefs aren't questioned no more. Not in the dumb
       | sense, where some preconceptions of truth rules, but in a truly
       | questioning, scientific style.
        
       | dr_dshiv wrote:
       | I wanted to quote Speusippus' funeral speech where he explained
       | why Plato was son of Apollo, but I just spent the past 20 minutes
       | looking for original sources AND IT IS TOO DAMN DIFFICULT.
       | 
       | The classics are astonishingly inaccessible from a technical
       | point of view. There are great efforts like the Perseus project
       | and Loeb. But so much work remains. An incredible amount of
       | material is not translated into English. And, when it is, it can
       | be incredibly difficult to get the original.
        
       | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
       | A discussion of ancient authors brings to mind CS Lewis's quote
       | about reading the classics for yourself:
       | 
       | There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient
       | books should be read only by the professionals, and that the
       | amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have
       | found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average
       | student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very
       | last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato
       | off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather
       | read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about "isms"
       | and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what
       | Plato actually said.
       | 
       | The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility.
       | The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers
       | face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not
       | understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because
       | of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern
       | commentator.
       | 
       | The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet
       | a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can
       | understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always
       | therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade
       | the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth
       | acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier
       | and more delightful to acquire.
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-06 23:01 UTC)