Plato, statesman and philosopher

The Philosopher and the Sage: Plato and Lao-Tzu on Following the Way of Nature

*** Lao-Tzu, paradoxical poet-philosopher of the mysterious Tao, father of the mysticalmeditative philosophical religion of Taoism. Plato, mathematically-minded theorizer of Forms, father of Academic philosophy and Western rationalism. What could these two foundational thinkers of East and West possibly have in common? Quite a lot, as it turns out. As we shall see, for both Plato 1 and Lao-Tzu,...

‘JOBS FOR PHILOSOPHERS’: statecraft and the Stranger in the Statesman in light of Socrates and the philosopher in the Theaetetus

Considering the Theaetetus and Statesman together – as the two dialogues explicitly said to flank the Sophist -both raises and suggests answers to questions about the relationship between philosopher and statesman, and the relationship between Socrates and the Eleatic Stranger. It is argued that aspects of the Theaetetus ‘Digression’ on the nature of philosophers serve to criticise the question...

Plato and Innatism

Plato and Innatism

Plato and Divination

Plato uses the idea of divinatory knowledge as a metaphorical descriptor for a variety of kinds of daytime, waking knowing. What unites these examples is that they all include discussion of a kind of knowing that cannot account for itself, and that is tentative, imagistic and non-discursive. These metaphorical uses can further be illuminated by his more detailed discussion of divinatory knowled...