PHI 2224 - Plato’s Search for Knowledge

Credits: 4
This course attempts to understand the dialogues of Plato, with their ironic protagonist Socrates, by locating them in the cultural, political and intellectual context of late fifth and early fourth century BCE Greece. Plato was engaged in a struggle to establish philosophy as a superior form of knowledge based on reason and dialectic. He tried to demonstrate that the sources and methods on which others based their knowledge—poetry, politics, religion and rhetoric—were unreliable and dangerous. We will read the dialogues of Plato against other culturally important materials: the epics of Homer, the rhetoric of the sophists, the political thought of Thucydides, Athenian tragedy. And we will measure the success of Plato’s efforts by asking to what extent one can ever hope to transcend one’s cultural context and attain knowledge that is secure, objective, “absolute”—a question as relevant in our own turbulent times as it was in Plato’s.
McDaniel Plan: International; Textual Analysis