Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues - The Great Courses

Written by The Great Courses
Read by Professor Michael Sugrue
Format: MP3
Unabridged

These 16 lectures bring the Socratic quest for truth alive and explore ideas that are as vital today as they were 25 centuries ago - ideas about truth, justice, love, beauty, courage, and wisdom that can change lives and reveal the world in new ways. Here, you’ll delve into the inner structure, action, and meaning of 17 of Plato’s greatest dialogues, making these lectures an indispensable companion for anyone interested in philosophy in general or Platonic thought in particular.
As you’ll learn, the dialogues share some general characteristics - and they all breathe with the feeling, the tension, and even the humor of great theater. Even if you don’t have time to reacquaint yourself directly with Platonic texts, you’ll benefit enormously from these lectures’ insights into the depths of reflection opened by Socrates and Plato - arguably the most important teacher-student pairing in history.
You’ll become engrossed in “the romance of the intellect,” as Professor Sugrue opens a path for you into the inner structure and action of these selected dialogues, for millennia the objects of devoted study by the noblest minds. These lectures offer no easy answers. What they give instead is much better: an introduction to Platonic “meta-education,” the art not of what to think but of how to think. You’ll see the stunning subtlety with which Plato weaves together the strengths of philosophy and poetry, dialectic and drama, word and action. And you’ll catch a glimpse of the “serious playfulness” that Socrates says the search for the good, the true, and the beautiful can inspire in the human soul.

NOTE: The accompanying reference material is available as a PDF.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:
01 The Domain of the Dialogues
02 What Socratic Dialogue is Not
03 The Examined Life
04 Tragedy in the Philosophic Age of the Greeks
05 Republic I—Justice, Power and Knowledge
06 Republic II-V—Soul and City
07 Republic VI-X—The Architecture of Reality
08 Laws—The Legacy of Cephalus
09 Protagoras—The Dialectic of the Many and the One
10 Gorgias—The Temptation to Speak
11 Parmenides—“Most True”
12 Sophist and Statesman—The Formal Disintegration of Justice
13 Phaedrus—Hymn to Love
14 Symposium—The Pride of Love
15 The Platonic Achievement
16 The Living Voice