I was reading Plato’s dialogue called Philebus, which is one of his later dialogues; it covers the topic of pleasure’s role in a good human life, which had already been covered much earlier, in the Republic. But in this dialogue, Plato adds some subtlety to the theory of pleasure—but moreso, I think, Plato viewed it as a chance to fully demonstrate the nature of dialectics, which he was always in the process of discovering and refining. There are some insights into pleasure in this dialogue, but more than anything it is a formal exercise—a demonstration of how to do dialectics, and how to distinguish true dialectics from false dialectics. One gets the idea that dialectics had become popular in the years since his early dialogues—but that his followers were not doing it correctly; Plato had a successful Academy, where the art and science of dialectics was of course taught; yet Plato still must have felt that it was not being fully understood; so he spelled it out in this dialogue.
The secret of true dialectics
The secret of true dialectics
The secret of true dialectics
I was reading Plato’s dialogue called Philebus, which is one of his later dialogues; it covers the topic of pleasure’s role in a good human life, which had already been covered much earlier, in the Republic. But in this dialogue, Plato adds some subtlety to the theory of pleasure—but moreso, I think, Plato viewed it as a chance to fully demonstrate the nature of dialectics, which he was always in the process of discovering and refining. There are some insights into pleasure in this dialogue, but more than anything it is a formal exercise—a demonstration of how to do dialectics, and how to distinguish true dialectics from false dialectics. One gets the idea that dialectics had become popular in the years since his early dialogues—but that his followers were not doing it correctly; Plato had a successful Academy, where the art and science of dialectics was of course taught; yet Plato still must have felt that it was not being fully understood; so he spelled it out in this dialogue.