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Hello, Plato's Symposium, one of the masterpieces of Western... program. It begins with the guests agreeing that having drunk too much the previous night, they better not over-indulge again.

The guests include some of the greatest figures of classical Athens, including the playwright Aristophanes and the philosopher Socrates.

These eminent individuals have a wide-ranging discussion which focuses on the nature of love,

what it is, where it comes from and what it means to be in love. The Symposium has had a lasting effect on

our thinking about love and physical desire influencing writers and

philosophers from the early Christian era to the Renaissance and beyond. We'd

meet to discuss Plato's Symposium R. and Jee Hobbs, Professor of the Public Understanding

of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, Richard Hunter, Regis Professor of Greek at the

University of Cambridge, and Frisbee Sheffield

Director of Studies in Philosophy at Christ College University of Cambridge.

Angie Hobbs, Plato, 4th century BC, one of the founders of Western philosophy can we just briefly say

something about his life yes he was born sometime between 49 and 423 BC into a

wealthy aristocratic Athenian family. He grew up witnessing the vicious

civil war between Sparta and Athens and he would have been expected to go into politics

but he became one of Socrates' closest associates and he also developed

a really keen interest in mathematics, so his tendencies were moving away from politics politics and then the final death knell to his

any political ambitions came in 399 when the Athenian democracy put Socrates to

death and Plato thought right that's it I'm now devoting my life to

writing and teaching in 387 he sets up the academy a sort of a research

institute though that's rather too formal a phrase where he wrote

...