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2 results

  • 3 - Plato’s Critique of the Homeric Education

  • Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Davidson College, North Carolina
  • Book:
    Homer and the Tradition of Political Philosophy
    Published online:
    18 August 2022
    Print publication:
    25 August 2022, pp 132-193

  • Summary

    Plato criticizes Homer’s effort to promote religious skepticism through his portrayal of the gods for overestimating the power of human reason and underestimating the power of human passions, and he criticizes Homer’s education concerning human excellence for inadvertently glamorizing the passionate and tragic hero Achilles and all too effectively hiding his own example as a philosophic thinker behind the mask of the divinely inspired singer. Plato therefore replaces the Homeric education with a new, poetic, Platonic education that presents Socrates – the fearless, dispassionate, self-sufficient, apolitical philosopher who promulgates the pious, edifying, and reassuring doctrines of the separate Forms and the Immortality of the Soul – as an explicit object of admiration and model for imitation.

  • 11 - Blindness and reorientation: education and the acquisition of knowledge in the Republic

  • Edited by Mark L. McPherran, Simon Fraser University, British Columbia
  • Book:
    Plato's 'Republic'
    Published online:
    04 February 2011
    Print publication:
    25 November 2010, pp 209-228

  • Summary

    Platonic education is forced to extend its purview to appetite and spirit. In the Republic, this part of education is discussed first, in Books 2 and 3. This chapter focuses on Platonic education's primary target and on the perplexing contrast Socrates draws between reorienting it and curing its blindness. Self-styled educators, who claim to be able to put knowledge into souls like sight into blind eyes stand revealed as people who think that the soul does not need an eye, a divine or god-like element, in order to acquire knowledge. Even if the soul were blind, so that it couldn't see the good itself were the two face to face, it could still, by learning everything else the philosopher learns, acquire knowledge. Countenancing the good, however, is a precondition of countenancing any forms.