Symposium

Philosophy

Print length: 100 pagesModern Library, 1996

Description

At an Athenian banquet in 416 BCE, a group of guests replaces heavy drinking with a friendly contest: each man must improvise a speech praising Eros. Their accounts move through comic myth, medical analogy, civic virtue, erotic longing, and the power of desire to inspire courage or achievement. Socrates then recounts the teaching of Diotima, who describes love as an ascent from attraction to one beautiful body toward appreciation of beauty itself. The orderly discussion is disrupted when Alcibiades arrives and praises Socrates rather than the god. Through this layered dialogue, Plato makes a social evening into an inquiry about what people seek through love and whether desire can educate the soul rather than merely possess its object.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Dialogue-driven · Witty

Pace

Measured

Tone

Cerebral · Philosophical · Playful · Reflective

Structure

Argumentative · Framed

Focus

Argument · Ideas · Voice

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 5 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

Knowledge and truthLoveMoralityTransformation

About Plato

Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher who made conversation a durable form of philosophical argument. Rather than presenting a doctrine in his own voice, he stages exchanges in which Socrates and other speakers define a question, expose contradictions, revise their claims, and press toward conclusions that may remain open to dispute. The settings give abstract inquiry a social and political life. A trial, a prison cell, or a banquet determines who speaks, what is at stake, and how quickly an argument must move. In The Republic, a dispute over justice expands from individual conduct to education, government, poetry, and the ideal city. Symposium varies the method through a sequence of competing speeches on love, then unsettles their order with Alcibiades’s late arrival. Phaedo places objections to the immortality of the soul within Socrates’s final hours, framing the discussion as a remembered account. Plato’s recurring interests include knowledge, virtue, civic authority, desire, and the Forms, but his characteristic method is to make ideas answerable to questioning voices.

Series

Platonic dialogue

The Republic Apple Books

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Modern Library
Language: English
ISBN: 9780679601975

Keep your books and notes in Collected for iPhone.

Apple Books is a service mark of Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.