GENERAL INTRODUCTION

generation. The rivalry of this private college with the professional school of Isocrates A famous Athenian orator and teacher who focused on practical political success through persuasive speaking, often clashing with Plato’s more theoretical approach. is discernible in the subject and tone of the Gorgias. Plato carried on the direction of the Academy The school founded by Plato in a grove dedicated to the hero Academus; it is often cited as the first university in the Western world. till his death, at eighty-one, in 346 While this manuscript cites 346 BC, modern scholarship typically places Plato’s death in 348 or 347 BC.; save that half-way through this period (367) he accepted the invitation of his friend Dion to undertake the instruction of the younger Dionysius at Syracuse A powerful Greek city-state in Sicily.. The elder tyrant had been annoyed by the Socratic freedom of Plato’s talk: now it was a wayward youth who refused the yoke of a systematic training. What that training was like we see in the Republic, where true political wisdom is approached by an arduous ascent through mathematics, logic, and metaphysics. Plato returned, with less hopes of obtaining the ideal ruler, to make wonderful conquests in the realm of thought.

The Meno and Gorgias set forth the doctrine that knowledge of right is latent Hidden or present but not yet realized; Plato believed we are born with innate knowledge that must be "remembered." in our minds: dialectic The process of seeking truth through rigorous question-and-answer dialogue., not the rhetoric of the schools, is the means of eliciting it. The method, as Plato soon perceived, must be long and difficult: but he felt a mystical rapture over its certainty, which led him to picture the immutable “forms” Also called the Theory of Ideas; the belief that perfect, unchanging versions of concepts like Beauty or Justice exist in a non-physical realm. as existing in a world of their own. This feeling, and the conviction whence it springs—that knowledge is somehow possible, had come to the front of his mind when he began to know Socrates. Two brilliant compositions, the Cratylus and Symposium, display the strength of the conviction, and then, the noble fervour of the feeling. In the latter of these works, the highest