Simon Blackburn on Plato's Cave

The Chinese philosopher Songzi (382 BCE – 305 BCE) maintained that the appropriate response to insults was indifference, not aggression. Jing Hu, a philosopher at Concordia University, Montreal puts his thinking about insults and about the related concept of shame in context, and ...  Show more

We are the kind of creature that cares whether or not we matter and how. What follows from this? Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Mattering, discuses this with David Edmonds. 

David and Tamler continue their discussion of Plato's allegory of the cave. We talk about the connections with mystical traditions including Gnosticism, Sufism, and Buddhist paths to awakening. We also dig deeper into what Socrates calls 'dialectic' – what allows this method t ...

Discussing Plato's Theatetus and Meno. 

In this week's episode, we learn about Plato's "Symposium", which you might think of as philosophy's version of fan fiction. We also learn about Plato's "Theory of Forms" and ask ourselves what makes a tree, well, a tree. This leads to discussion of Plato's famous "Allegory of th ...  Show more

The Divided Line, Form of the Good, and Cave in Plato's Republic