Hi. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you

with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust.

Online at W.W.

History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Know Thyself, two unloved platonic dialogues.

Here in the UK there's this radio show called Desert Island Discs. They invite

famous people on and ask them to say which music they'd want to have with them if they knew

they were going to be stranded on a desert island.

At the end, the guests also get to say which book they'd want to have with them, not counting

the Bible and Shakespeare.

Now this is something I've never understood.

Surely the answer is painfully obvious.

If you were going to have only one book on a desert island, why would you consider taking anything

other than the collected works of Plato? My copy of the collected dialogues is 1,745 pages long, not counting

the index. That's enough to keep you company through many a lonely Desert Island night.

If you were trapped on a Desert Island and started reading Plato's

dialogues one after another, I predict you'd be impressed at how deep his back catalog is.

Once you look past Plato's greatest hits, like the Republic and the Fido, you'd find plenty of other dialogues that are not just worth reading, but reading a few dozen times.

You might as well, after all, since you're stuck on a desert island.

In this episode, I'm going to look at two such

dialogues, the Carmides and the Euthadimus. These aren't famous works, but they show Plato at his best or close to his best.

First then, the Carmides. Like most of Plato's dialogues the Carmides is named after one of the main characters who appears in it.

...