The Plato Paradigm

What Plato Dramatized

Episodes

0206 Lysis 205d

July 11, 2025 • 14 mins

Socrates criticizes Hippothales for his speeches and songs, but not for the right reason.

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0205 Lysis 205a

July 4, 2025 • 14 mins

Ctesippus describes to Socrates the sort of ridiculous praise his friend Hippothales has been directing at Lysis. It turns out that Hippothales is not in fact praising Lysis.

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We learn some more about Lysis, the formal subject of this part of the conversation. Lysis is the son of Democrates of the deme Aixone, so he is of an aristocratic family. He seems to have it all - looks, wealth, status, reputation, and a course in wrestling. We should not forget, however, the the most important things we learn are from characters themselves, about themselves, and here we learn quite a bit about Hippothales, Ctesip...

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0203 Lysis 204c

June 20, 2025 • 14 mins

Ctesippus enters the chat. He informs Socrates that Hippothales is so obsessed with Lysis that he is an annoyance to Ctesippus and the others of their age group.

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0202 Lysis 204a

June 13, 2025 • 14 mins

Socrates, using his god-given gift to recognize lusters and lusted, quickly ascertains that Hippothales is lusting after a younger boy in the wrestling school. Socrates' profession of ignorance with regard to all other things should be taken with a grain of salt, as should be the notion that a god was required to give Socrates the ability to deduce Hippothales' infatuation with someone.

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0201 Lysis 203a

June 6, 2025 • 14 mins

The youths, including Hippothales and Ctesippus, are assmbled outside of a palaestra, where they spend time in words. During this introductory chat we come to appreciate one feature of Socratic dialectic, namely how Plato's Socrates sets up conversations in advance. We should not apply this feature to Socrates in every dialogue, but it is certainly a feature in the later early dialogues, and some middle ones (e.g., Hippias Minor, H...

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0200 Lysis 203a

May 30, 2025 • 14 mins

Socrates says he was walking from Academy straight to Lyceum, but on the way encountered a crowd of youths. Is he about to be mugged under the city wall of Athens?

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0199 Io Conclusions 2 of 2

May 23, 2025 • 14 mins

Socrates conceals his dialectic exercise with rhetoric and even eristics in an attempt to make Io, who enjoys listening to sophists (he says "you sophoi"), and consequently nice rhetorical stories such as the magnet analogy, actually consider what his rhapsodic techne is. It does include thousands of Homeric lines as subject matter, but this does not mean he is an expert (has the techne) regarding each subject talked about.
I have n...

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0198 Io Conclusions 1 of 2

May 16, 2025 • 14 mins

What the dialogue is not about.

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0197 Io 542a

May 9, 2025 • 14 mins

In this final section of the dialogue, Socrates provides Io with two options. Either Io has techne and refuses to divulge his sophia to Socrates, and is therefore doing wrong, or he has no techne but is divinely inspired. Should he choose to be considered unjust or divine?

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0196 Io 541e

May 2, 2025 • 14 mins

Socratae, beginning his concluding remarks, presents the first of his two options for Io. Accordinng to this first option, Io is doing Socrates wrong by purposely shapeshifting in order to avoid revealing how clever he is with regard to the sophia of Homer.

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0195 Io 541c

April 25, 2025 • 14 mins

Socrates finishes off the argument refuting Io's claim that he is a general, let alone a good general, incidentally revealing that the dramatic date of the dialogue is around 413 BC, after the disastrous Athenian campaign against Syracuse.

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0194 Io 541b

April 18, 2025 • 14 mins

Socrates begins dismantling Io's claim that he has a techne common to rhapsodes and generals. Io accepts that he is the best rhapsode and the best general, but he cannot accept that any general is also a rhapsode, for the very good reason, I suggest, that a general is not a rhapsode. This is not a refutation based on logic, but an argument from observation.

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0193 Io 540e

April 11, 2025 • 14 mins

Having essentially agreed (in not so many words) that each techne has exclusive subject matter, it is perhaps surprising that Io remains steadfast over his claim that the rhapsode and the strategos share the same techne.

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0192 Io 540d

April 4, 2025 • 14 mins

Io had been forced to narrow the rhapsode's expertise down to knowing what sort of things it would be fitting for different types of people to say, ,such as a man, a woman, a slave or a ruler, rather than any type of craftsman. However, Socrates has derailed this approach to rhapsody by giving each of these types of people various types of techne: the ruler he has turned into a ruler of a ship at sea (a helmsman), and a ruler of a ...

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0191 Io 540b

March 28, 2025 • 14 mins

Io misspoke when he formulated the rhapsode's techne as the ability to know the sort of things any type of person should say. It is easy for Socrates to make Io admit that craftsmen of all other crafts will say things connected to their crafts more finely than a rhapsode could - this after all is what they have been assuming for a long time now.

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0190 Io 539d

March 21, 2025 • 14 mins

What began as a question over who can judge better when Homer is speaking well has recently become a question of which techne is better suited to judge the subject matter of the poem. In every case, the professional associated with the subject matter being discussed is preferred to the rhapsode, since Io accepts the sophistic principle of exclusivity (if one techne knows X, then the rhapsodic techne doesn't know X). This pushes Io ...

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0189 Io 539b

March 14, 2025 • 14 mins

Socrates quotes another Homeric example of the mantike techne (the craft of the seer). Unlike the first example, a prophecy, the.second example is an omen.

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0188 Io 538c

March 7, 2025 • 14 mins

Socrates adds to the medical quote from Homer a quote from the techne (craft) of fishing, and another from the craft of divination. It still appears to Io that professionals rather than a rhapsode would be able to better judge whether Homer speaks well about these ultimately minor details from entire professions..

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0187 Io 538b

February 28, 2025 • 14 mins

Socrates makes a meal of the refutation. One point I don't discuss in the podcast is why a charioteer would want to judge a poet anyway, and the question may be directed at the judging of rhapsodes in competitions. What exactly is being judged? Their knowledge of the subject matter talked about by the poet, or their ability to perform the poem? This would seem to be an easy question to answer, but it would imply that the subject ma...

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The Plato Paradigm

Episodes

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.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}0205 Lysis 205a

0204 Lysis 204e

0203 Lysis 204c

0202 Lysis 204a

0201 Lysis 203a

0200 Lysis 203a

0199 Io Conclusions 2 of 2

0198 Io Conclusions 1 of 2

0197 Io 542a

0196 Io 541e

0195 Io 541c

0194 Io 541b

0193 Io 540e

0192 Io 540d

0191 Io 540b

0190 Io 539d

0189 Io 539b

0188 Io 538c

0187 Io 538b

Popular Podcasts

0206 Lysis 205d

0205 Lysis 205a