CartLearning How to Die:
Socratic Discipline & the Philosophical Life – Part II Instructor: Daniel Sacilotto Date & Time: August 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th 14:00-16:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: This Seminar further examines the systematic integrity of Socratic thought in its theoretical and practical aspects. After our excursion into the Last Days of Socrates, in which philosophy becomes explicitly defined as the art of learning how to die with ease, the second part of this Seminar confronts key middle and late Platonic dialogs: the Theaetetus, Sophist, Parmenides, Philebus and Timaeus. In these dialogs, as we shall see, Plato enacts a profound re-elaboration of key metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical tenets of Socratic thought, realizing the synthesis of Parmenidean dialectic and Pythagoreanism announced in the Phaedo during Socrates’ final hours. Escaping the perceived skepticism of Heracliteanism and its maligned expression in Athenian democracy at the hands of the sophists, this proposed synthesis of dialectics with a mathematical realism also becomes key to transforming the Socratic conception of The Philosophical Life. In this way, we shall see, Plato’s articulation of Truth, Beauty, and Justice reflect not transcendent metaphysical platitudes but the systematically cohesive regulative ideals organizing the integrity of speculative, aesthetic, and ethico-political functions of thought.
We shall accordingly observe how Plato confronts a series of perennial philosophical questions and problems: the articulation between being and becoming; the dialectical tension between that which “is” and “is not’;” the One and the Many; the analytic procedure of the method of division and its articulation with the synthetic method of dialectical ascent; the relation between pleasure and knowledge as they inform ethical reasoning. Along the way, we will engage in a continuous assessment of the critiques and appropriations of Platonism since the modern period and until today in different strands of materialist and realist thought: from dialectical materialism to structuralized psychoanalysis, neorationalism, structural realism, and speculative materialism.
IMAGE: Platonic Academy
To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.
To see The New Centre Refund Policy CLICK HERE.