08 Plato Strikes Back! w/ Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Ancient Greece Declassified
Dr. Lantern Jack
4.8 • 587 Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2017
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein joins us for a discussion about Plato, Socrates, and the legacy of Greek philosophy. Goldstein is one of the most acclaimed and widely-read philosophers today. Her most recent book, Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away, imagines Plato transported through time to the modern world having philosophical debates with scientists, celebrities, and technology pioneers about important life questions. More than just a series of fascinating dialogues, the book also offers a gripping account of the development of ancient Greek philosophy, tackling some of the big questions and mysteries along the way: Why was Socrates killed? What was Plato's relationship to Socrates? Why did philosophy emerge in Greece to begin with? Profound, witty, and entertaining, the book is also a defense of the enduring value of philosophy in the modern world.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, thanks for tuning in to ancient Greece, Declassified. |
| 0:12.0 | Episode 8 |
| 0:16.0 | Plato Strikes Back. What is justice? Plato strikes back. |
| 0:24.6 | What is justice? What is beauty? |
| 0:26.6 | What is love? |
| 0:28.6 | What is worth living for? |
| 0:30.6 | What is worth dying for? |
| 0:32.6 | And if you have an answer to any of these questions, |
| 0:36.6 | how do you know you're right? |
| 0:38.3 | Are these just matters of personal opinion? |
| 0:41.3 | Or, as the X-Files tagline suggests, is the truth out there? |
| 0:46.3 | And if so, do we have access to it? |
| 0:49.3 | All these questions and many more were discussed by the ancient Athenian philosopher Plato. |
| 0:56.0 | You might have heard the famous quote that all European philosophy is basically footnotes to Plato, |
| 1:02.0 | because he raised all the big issues that philosophers have continued to wrestle with ever since. |
| 1:09.0 | But who was this guy who dared to condemn future philosophers to footnote writing? |
| 1:13.6 | In order to understand that, we need to back up a bit to where we left off in the last episode. |
| 1:19.6 | After the Persian Wars, which ended in 479 BC, Athens emerged as the cultural and economic powerhouse of the Greek world for the next |
| 1:30.1 | almost 80 years. What put an end to that golden age of Athenian democracy was a long and bitter |
| 1:37.5 | conflict with Sparta, called the Peloponnesian War, which the Spartans finally won in 404 BC. |
| 1:45.0 | One of the most interesting characters from this first long stretch of Athenian democracy, |
| 1:51.0 | whose life spanned most of it, was a guy named Socrates. |
... |
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