I just finished reading the republic, translated in to English. I read the last 200 pages last night...

I just finished reading the republic, translated in to English. I read the last 200 pages last night, when I heard people partying and enjoying their youths, and this morning. And not solely to gain the pseud cred, it was enjoyable. After some drudgerous shitfest like brothers Karamazov, some non fiction books have prose that is easy to appreciate. Reading Plato / Socrates condemn degeneracy did compensate for being a loser a bit, but I know ultimately it's an arbitrary opinion.

I don't have a lot to say about the book. It contained autistic daydreaming. It had really fucking half assed Sociology and political theorising ("4 Inferior Forms of Government- Number 3 Will SHOCK You!"), compared to long books today. The numerology was laughable. I lolled at how the translator and person who wrote the introduction, some Oxbridge public schooler, didn't write a lot of commentary about some of the numerology or 100 % bullshitty parts. Even he can't take it seriously.

I lolled at Plato's curriculum. 18-20: Military service (and physical activity all through life). 20-30: Mathematics (I assume he would approve of physics these days as well). Only at 30+ do you become a humanitiesfag. He would have zero respect for humanitiesfags today and "literary intellectuals". He agrees with me that art is for aesthetic value only, NOT for philosophising. He is basically me. Although not quite, he does deride young people who learn some philosophy and argue with everything. I think he means people like me who see that even Plato has no foundation.

I can't take any of this seriously intellectually though. My no BS view is that trying to answer questions of this type a priori (and even if you had a world simulator) is a fruitlessess endeavour.

My memory is awful but he concludes that acting in accordance with justice makes you mentally healthy. Even granting him all the dumb assumptions, if it's a question of health then why call it Justice?

Forms are just arbitrary definitions. This was a precursor to "objective morality". Academic philosophy selects for unfalsifiable ideas because they facilitate the citation circlejerk and book deals.

I think the two main responses will be abuse for pointing out that forms are arbitrary definitions ("REEE They exist in the ether, let me prove it using pen and paper") and using the word unfalsifiable. I don't use unfalsifiable as a synonym for wrong. I simply point out that there are infinitely many possible unfalsifiable theories. So why do we get told to care only about famous ones? (Answer: Fashion, financial incentives, intellectual dishonesty)

The second type of non insult response I will get is "Just turn your brain off, smoke weed, and enjoy it man!" I enjoyed it and did turn my brain off but I'm not turning my brain off now.

I feel I can start reading what I like and stop reading boring novels. The republic is as canon as it gets so pseuds can't criticise me for not reading it.

Crappy book imo. Read some Max Stirner next time.

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you are the definition of a psued you fucking dope

nice fucking blog post you fucking loser

>forms are arbitrary definitions

But that's not what he meant. he proposed a metaphysics whereby the us, the world around us was merely ugly, impure representations of the 'true' world of the forms

>many possible unfalsifiable theories.

he presents arguments for his theory. why not argue against that instead of having a wee hernia and spazzing about how it's unfalsifiable (welcome to philosophy, shitskin)

>I feel I can start reading what I like and stop reading boring novels. The republic is as canon as it gets so pseuds can't criticise me for not reading it.

you're a fucking loser, probably non-white, who reads for all the wrong reasons, and cares way too much about what probably other niggeers in your life think about you. head on over to /fa/,, fucking cunt, where pathological levels of insecurity like yours are celebrated

YOU ARE:

1. Probable kike and/or nigger
2. blogposting utter cunt faggot nigger piece of shit attention whoring on an anonymous site worthless fucking loser
3. idiot cunt who should stick to the kardashians and not philosophy
4. just generally a worthless cunt who ought to have been ted bundys 35th victim
5. fuck off and die cunt

Plato's Republic relevance is more of just being a debating piec and being a documented anthropological political philosophy map for students to understand how subsequent philosophers after him developed and formed their ideology in response to Plato. Even as a fan of Plato, the Republic is pretty overrated and not one of his best dialogues compared to something Theaetetus or Phaedrus when it comes to really firing the ol' neurons. Even Plato basically back-traces and denounces most of the political philosophy in the Republic in his last and longest dialogue, the Laws, which he advocates for a heavily regulated democratic-polity--basically a mixed state selecting the best features of Sparta and Athens and combining it into one State. Aristotle also shitted on the Republic for being too idealistic and too ambiguous that it failed to meet any of the points it set out to make, in his 'Politics', which I believe is far better piece in discussing political science of it-self, but it's too-dry and long for many new students of philosophy to palate, and less dramatic and aesthetic in prose than the Republic, and requires the reader to be more familiar with Ancient Greek culture and history.

Also, Penguin a fucking shit. You should've got the Hackett translation and commentary on the Republic, ya' dingus.

Read what I posted. I said that I'm not using unfalsifiable as a synonym for wrong. I'm just pointing out that there are infinitely many unfalsifiable conjectures.

Book is both overrated and underrated.

Overrated because people who haven't actually read it put it on their list of political books and claim that it supports their agenda (same with Leviathan)

Underrated because pseuds read it and deconstruct it without understanding the spiritual truth that is within it. People like you aren't ready to read philosophy.

>Muh book gives me spiritual superpowers and muh inner peace!

Um, no sweetie! We live in the 21st century! Put on your big boy pants and stop being a iddle widdle obscurantist!

philosophy is an unfolding of a thousand layers; plato is like the 16th layer. he's wrong a lot and right a lot as is to be expected.

this guy gets it.

My professor put it this way- beginner philosophy students always want to find the "correct" philosopher who gets it all right. The problem is that all of the philosophers are correct- they are also all wrong. The Truth that they are searching for is not something that any one person can "know" in full. We can only get glimpses of it, which inspire us to write and make art.

so Plato caught a glimpse of the Truth- and that is what you ought to search for when you read him, rather than trying to rip him down with your babby-tier philosophy skills

I don't want to say that "you just don't get it" but I think i'm going to have to.

Plus, you're forgetting that the work is over 2,300 years old.

Australia's little brother knows how to really do it!!!

I think people new to philosophy need to take great care to not fall into the trap of confusing philosophy with 'the history of philosophical authors/books'

my experience studying philosophy in university was the same. much talk about authors, specific works, authours lives, authors influence, literary traditions (continential, etc),

little focus on ideas

see: nitezche, who is basically a fiction writer, who is for some reason held as a main figure in the philosophical canon.

philosophy is about ideas, and the arguments for them, don't get sucked into thinking it's about the authors

you'll learn more about philosophy reading a debate forum, or SEP, or hell even reddit askphiosophy, than reading shit like plato

>nitezche, who is basically a fiction writer
i know just what you mean but let's not get crazy. at least three of his books are god-tier.

>Reads 200 pages of Plato in an evening
>Has a critique he believes we need to hear

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>I lolled at Plato's curriculum. 18-20: Military service (and physical activity all through life). 20-30: Mathematics (I assume he would approve of physics these days as well). Only at 30+ do you become a humanitiesfag.

I think he got that exactly right. It bloows my mind that 20yos think they understand enough of life to enforce their retarded opinion on others.

You are correct /philisophy major

This is correct

Go read Plato at the Googleplex. It'll better explain what's going on in the Republic. Basically Plato walking around in the modern day with historical context and modern philosophy tidbits peppered in.

Also this.

Of course his ideas and writing quality are outdated. He was writing philosophy 400 years after writing was invented. Two hundred years after he died Archimedes would invent the fucking screw.

You sound like someone who would enjoy reading edgy babby stuff like Sartre.

Also, Plato's refutation of moral relativism still stands firm as a rock and you can do nothing about it

>"If the way things appear to me, in that way they exist for me, and the way things appears to you, in that way they exist for you, then it appears to me that your whole doctrine is false." Since anything that appears to me is true, then it must be true that Protagoras is wrong

Thracymachus could have sharpened his game up a bit, he came across as an incoherent newfag. But is Thracymachus really /our/ guy?

lol

No, Kant actually got everything correct as metaphysics are concerned. The end.

I've never read Plato, but even I know you're a shitblogging retard.

he posted on /his/ too and everybody laughed at the autism. Heh, kids...

You need to add Descartes to Kant. Then philosophy is over.

>not reading Paul Shorey translation
Pleb

I think it went over your head.
>Hearing the pleb partying and thinking it matters
There are thousands of party's every day and many you can particpate in the future. Most party's are shitty anyway and the people are dumb and shallow. Also I bet you read a mediocre translation at best. And you didn't even have original Greek text to look unclear/dubious parts up. All in all it was basically worthless for you and that's okay it high education/ classical education isn't for everybody.

>Forms are just arbitrary definitions
Before you can do anything in mathematics, you have to agree on "arbitrary" premises that can't be proven. Still every "hard" science that's taken serious works on those principals.

...

The fact you made fun of The Brothers Karamazov devalues every other point you made in this faggy blogpost

>he is basically me

So youre a 3 thousand year old philosopher who's thoughts ring out in the annals of history forever? Fucking neck yourself asap cunt.

>I didn't go out and get pussy last night or any night
>lol I translated an ancient book

neck yourself faggot you're why the white race is dying

>modern philosophy curriculums make you a competent thinker and represent the works of the philosophical cannon accurately
Don't let yourself ever be bothered with reality.

>participating in (((modern culture)))

Of course. Mathematics is a particular sub set of philosophy. It is helpful to care about it in the real world. You don't have to agree with it. Similarly with physics or chemistry.

There are infinitely many sub sets of philosophy. Why care about or believe particular ones? The answer is because of personal whims, which are influenced by society and fashion.

Randian retard alert.

Lol, so basically philosophy is relativism. Wew such metaphysics.

awesome, so this retard stays home and never meets a girl has a family or does anything useful. top kek retard.

It's possible and indeed beneficial to do BOTH. Get fucked, Americoon.

Far from outdated, he has never been surpassed. In fact, no one has even come close to his ideas and philosophy has degraded to such a low quality that memes like 'Is it a rabbit? Or is it a duck?' are considered a search for wisdom.

like this retard has a genetically viable mate at this rate. Get fucked emu bait.

Nietzsche's critique of Plato: HE SOO JELLY!

Are you the guy that posts on biz about your junk food addiction and hating your shitty gov job and drinking coffee 10pm while riding the tube?

>boohoo my roastie vag won't get fucked
>better shame people that don't want to commit to the "going-out-and-have-good-time-without-any-consequences" culture

you moron I already have 4 white children why is Austria so bad at English?

Show proof.
Also, funny from you to assume that I'm shit at English, while you typed some incoherent sentence.
You're probably some white trash.

>like this retard has a genetically viable mate at this rate.

More genetically viable than you, nigger - we're 92% white, after all. Get fucked, you circumcised faggot.

lol to all y'all. :)

:)

We have a bunch of golden retrievers in here complaining that someone doesn't understand Plato.

NEXT-LEVEL DIALECTICS!

get rid of that murican vpn, you fucking aussiecunt

that's not what I said at all. There is a Truth, but it's not what most people think it is. It's not simply a "correct answer" that we find through science. That is the bastardization of the word in English, where "truth" is equal to "correctness". In medieval and classical philosophy, "Truth" more or less means "God", or "the totality of Being" etc.

Because we are limited human beings, and because we are all born in particular contexts and speak particular languages, our attempts to express the Truth are always going to be limited. Philosophers are like sculptors: they start with the same block of marble, but reveal different works of art within it, different meanings, different expressions of Truth. That's why the word for "Truth" in ancient Greece was "aletheia". "Letheia" means "concealed, hidden, closed-off, covered". A-letheia means "un-concealed, un-hidden, dis-closed, dis-covered".

That is what philosophers do- they reach into the void, towards the truth, and they pull out bits and pieces of it, and transmit them to us through writing and through action. They are un-concealing the meaning of Truth, the same way that a sculptor un-conceals the marvel from the marble.

lmao actually a plebian

doesn't stand firm once you think about falcification and philosophy of science . Protagoras can be falcifide and measured with simple statistics the same as Plato's position.

You are a dumb fuck for not realising the discussion being about
>functional contextualism vs. mechanism

>still stands firm as a rock and you can do nothing about it
go back and read a few more book stupid student /p/seudo /p/hilosopher

@OP

It is a fucking book. There have been hundreds of other dick heads who wrote similiar stuff with different angles to it. Learn some languages and go through the rennaissance...enough criticism and new ideas hidden in that for a life time

The truest meme I've ever seen

The problem is that this idea that philosophy occurs as opinion and that we cannot know truth is a completely modernist interpretation of philosophy, and as such is not an understanding of philosophy at all. There is no equality in the world of philosophy, the philosophers are not all correct. While there is always a hint of truth in everything said this is far from a philosopher knowing truth. The best thing one says may simply be an accident.

I would say that there is an objective truth, but due to the passage of time and the will of the gods this state of truth is in flux. And this is why Plato's concept of forms is so powerful, and why so many have a hard time understanding it. They are too much a product of their time, too determined by the minor scales of their era.

Perhaps this was simply a mistake of wording on your part and you didn't intend to suggest equality. But I am unconvinced of this idea of the hidden spring from which truth is pulled. truth may actually be quite simple, and it is the excess which prevents us from speaking to it properly.

Plato walked that line between excess and simplicity quite well, he would pull the excess of conversation into formed ideas. What was it that Pascal said, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." To write something concise, indeed to cut out the excess in any work of art, can be the most difficult task. But it is often the final task so that something more can be said with fewer words.

We have a wholly materialist conception of how truth functions, but it may be toroidal rather than linear - and whereby the inner, and lesser, material performs the heavier task. One man's life may give us a closer glimpse of truth than all the accumulated information of all the lives.

cont'd

I think Plato uncovered the contradictory nature of truth, and this was a sort of immaterial excess which confounds and betrays us rather than a material excess that we can never fully grasp. The problem with the latter, modernist view is that it leads to a sort of Parmenidean fatalism - we deny that a whole is possible so all of our attempts are condemned to be nothing.

I love how the theme of condemning degeneracy is recurrent in the Ancient and Medieval world

it's not that all philosophers are "equally correct" so much as that they all have a key insight that is worth considering. Some philosophers are just plain bad, like Bertrand Russell (partly joking), and some are far better than average, like Plato or Thomas Aquinas, but just because Thomas Aquinas gets theology right doesn't mean you should ignore all the other medieval thinkers who disagreed with him, and so on.

This kind of thinking is the exact opposite of relativism- it's essentialism. The idea is that you deconstruct FOR essence, that is you deconstruct in order to find the truth of the thinker, rather than to discard him as useless. It is a "modern philosophy" but that doesn't mean it's wrong all on it's own. I've learned these ideas from Heidegger and from teachers who studied with him or with his students.

But plato was a fag that fucked kids
>read 200 pages last night
When does school start again?

Pluto didn't say nothin about: Mom, Oil, Trees, Humpin, Eggs, Raising hell, Fuckin huntin, Unamerican activities, Cunts, Kkk, Eire, or Rolling omg the hay. Nigger tier bullshit.

Fuck your proto commie statist bullshit.

While the process you may be using in reading those philosophers may be essentialism, which I agree is important, the thought that reading minor philosophers is in itself a value is not at all essentialism. It is a liberal concept of equality and accumulating knowledge through questioning of your enemies.

Essentialism can be attained through the democratic or masters approach, but either method is not in itself essentialism. Although I think an argument can be made that the masters approach is much more akin to essentialism while the democratic approach is in fact relativistic. In the latter case you are trying to create a patchwork of truth through multiple readings, while in the former your master is guiding you along his path until you understand the essence of his search for truth. When you are ready then you are then allowed to search for your own essential path of truth.

Without mastery there is no essence. While you may be able to read multiple subjects and get a grasp of their basics you will never master them, and so will never understand the essence. Mastering a single subject does allow you attain mastery and understanding of the essence, and so brings you closer truth. Another less is more example, and this is generally the case of virtuosos, they master one area first, or have an epiphany from god. There are no masters (or they are far fewer) who who study willy-nilly and patch together a diverse facade of ideas. And this is why there are so few masters in our time, the democratic approach is the antithesis of essentialism and mastery.

Uh, no. He actually took a big risk in arguing against that because a lot of the politicians and philosophers promoted pederasty.

I do not recommend reading Republic. In fact book is really shitty and they are much better books than this. Says guy from Republic.

>Why care about or believe particular ones?
I care, because i'm low time preference. Not every concept in mathematics can be used in anything that "functions" and there is still a beauty to it, the same goes for art and i personally believe those too fields like literature to be fields of applied philosphy. Therefore i care about the individual and particular field or idea, because an infinite amount of possiblities lies within them. Those, who think everything that doesn't almost instantly leads to functing result doesn't matter, are in my experiance those, who lack the faustian spirit, since they chose to ignore, what can't be explanied yet to a significant Proportion.

>those two fields

Tbk is a great book, if the end of the Alyosha book doesn't make you cry tears of bitter joy you're an edgy teen. I'm just finishing Mitya's book right now.

bump

>I read the last 200 pages last night, when I heard people partying and enjoying their youths

So how'd your first year at university treat you?