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A República é, desde moitos puntos de vista, a máis importante obra de Platón. A conversa inicial entre Sócrates e diversos personaxes como o sofista Trasímaco ou os irmáns máis vellos de Platón acaba centrando o tema na natureza e dimension da xustiza para os humanos. Agora ben, en vista de que a persoa perfectamente xusta e para Platon a perfectamente boa en todos os sentidos, o asunto consiste, a fin de contas, na determinacion dos fundamentos e o valor dunha vida boa. Ese nucleo argumental brinda ao autor a ocasion de manifestar a sua posicion ante o practica totalidade das cuestions que podia abranguer un pensador da Grecia clasica: a natureza do ser, a estrutura da mente, o metodo cientifico ou a subordinacion da orde social e do sistema educativo a natureza do individuo. A Republica representa, pois, o primeiro gran tratado da filosofia occidental, unha obra profetica e eterna, que, concibida varios seculos antes da nosa era, aborda aspectos que ainda hoxe, no terceiro milenio, continuan sendo obxecto de reflexion e debate. A nosa version galega incorpora os dez libros completos da obra orixinal

This Dialogue begins abruptly with a question of Meno, who asks, whether virtue can be taught. Socrates replies that he does not as yet know what virtue is, and has never known anyone who did. Then he cannot have met Gorgias when he was at Athens. Yes, Socrates had met him, but he has a bad memory, and has forgotten what Gorgias said. Will Meno tell him his own notion, which is probably not very different from that of Gorgias? O yesnothing easier: there is the virtue of a man, of a woman, of an old man, and of a child; there is a virtue of every age and state of life, all of which may be easily described.

In several of the dialogues of Plato, doubts have arisen among his interpreters as to which of the various subjects discussed in them is the main thesis. The speakers have the freedom of conversation; no severe rules of art restrict them, and sometimes we are inclined to think, with one of the dramatis personae in the Theaetetus, that the digressions have the greater interest. Yet in the most irregular of the dialogues there is also a certain natural growth or unity; the beginning is not forgotten at the end, and numerous allusions and references are interspersed, which form the loose connecting links of the whole. We must not neglect this unity, but neither must we attempt to confine the Platonic dialogue on the Procrustean bed of a single idea. (Compare Introduction to the Phaedrus.)Two tendencies seem to have beset the interpreters of Plato in this matter. First, they have endeavoured to hang the dialogues upon one another by the slightest threads; and have thus been led to opposite and contradictory assertions respecting their order and sequence. The mantle of Schleiermacher has descended upon his successors, who have applied his method with the most various results. The value and use of the method has been hardly, if at all, examined either by him or them. Secondly, they have extended almost indefinitely the scope of each separate dialogue; in this way they think that they have escaped all difficulties, not seeing that what they have gained in generality they have lost in truth and distinctness. Metaphysical conceptions easily pass into one another; and the simpler notions of antiquity, which we can only realize by an effort, imperceptibly blend with the more familiar theories of modern philosophers.

No answer is given in the Lysis to the question, What is Friendship? any more than in the Charmides to the question, What is Temperance? There are several resemblances in the two Dialogues: the same youthfulness and sense of beauty pervades both of them; they are alike rich in the description of Greek life. The question is again raised of the relation of knowledge to virtue and good, which also recurs in the Laches; and Socrates appears again as the elder friend of the two boys, Lysis and Menexenus. In the Charmides, as also in the Laches, he is described as middle-aged; in the Lysis he is advanced in years.

The Cratylus has always been a source of perplexity to the student of Plato. While in fancy and humour, and perfection of style and metaphysical originality, this dialogue may be ranked with the best of the Platonic writings, there has been an uncertainty about the motive of the piece, which interpreters have hitherto not succeeded in dispelling. We need not suppose that Plato used words in order to conceal his thoughts, or that he would have been unintelligible to an educated contemporary. In the Phaedrus and Euthydemus we also find a difficulty in determining the precise aim of the author. Plato wrote satires in the form of dialogues, and his meaning, like that of other satirical writers, has often slept in the ear of posterity.

After an interval of some months or years, and at Phlius, a town of Peloponnesus, the tale of the last hours of Socrates is narrated to Echecrates and other Phliasians by Phaedo the beloved disciple. The Dialogue necessarily takes the form of a narrative, because Socrates has to be described acting as well as speaking. The minutest particulars of the event are interesting to distant friends, and the narrator has an equal interest in them.During the voyage of the sacred ship to and from Delos, which has occupied thirty days, the execution of Socrates has been deferred. (Compare Xen. Mem.) The time has been passed by him in conversation with a select company of disciples. But now the holy season is over, and the disciples meet earlier than usual in order that they may converse with Socrates for the last time.

The search after the Statesman, which is carried on, like that for the Sophist, by the method of dichotomy, gives an opportunity for many humorous and satirical remarks. Several of the jests are mannered and laboured: for example, the turn of words with which the dialogue opens; or the clumsy joke about man being an animal, who has a power of two-feetboth which are suggested by the presence of Theodorus, the geometrician. There is political as well as logical insight in refusing to admit the division of mankind into Hellenes and Barbarians: if a crane could speak, he would in like manner oppose men and all other animals to cranes. The pride of the Hellene is further humbled, by being compared to a Phrygian or Lydian. Plato glories in this impartiality of the dialectical method, which places birds in juxtaposition with men, and the king side by side with the bird-catcher; king or vermin-destroyer are objects of equal interest to science (compare Parmen.). There are other passages which show that the irony of Socrates was a lesson which Plato was not slow in learningas, for example, the passing remark, that the kings and statesmen of our day are in their breeding and education very like their subjects; or the anticipation that the rivals of the king will be found in the class of servants; or the imposing attitude of the priests, who are the established interpreters of the will of heaven, authorized by law. Nothing is more bitter in all his writings than his comparison of the contemporary politicians to lions, centaurs, satyrs, and other animals of a feebler sort, who are ever changing their forms and natures. But, as in the later dialogues generally, the play of humour and the charm of poetry have departed, never to return.

The Menexenus has more the character of a rhetorical exercise than any other of the Platonic works. The writer seems to have wished to emulate Thucydides, and the far slighter work of Lysias. In his rivalry with the latter, to whom in the Phaedrus Plato shows a strong antipathy, he is entirely successful, but he is not equal to Thucydides. The Menexenus, though not without real Hellenic interest, falls very far short of the rugged grandeur and political insight of the great historian. The fiction of the speech having been invented by Aspasia is well sustained, and is in the manner of Plato, notwithstanding the anachronism which puts into her mouth an allusion to the peace of Antalcidas, an event occurring forty years after the date of the supposed oration. But Plato, like Shakespeare, is careless of such anachronisms, which are not supposed to strike the mind of the reader. The effect produced by these grandiloquent orations on Socrates, who does not recover after having heard one of them for three days and more, is truly Platonic.

The Philebus appears to be one of the later writings of Plato, in which the style has begun to alter, and the dramatic and poetical element has become subordinate to the speculative and philosophical. In the development of abstract thought great advances have been made on the Protagoras or the Phaedrus, and even on the Republic. But there is a corresponding diminution of artistic skill, a want of character in the persons, a laboured march in the dialogue, and a degree of confusion and incompleteness in the general design. As in the speeches of Thucydides, the multiplication of ideas seems to interfere with the power of expression. Instead of the equally diffused grace and ease of the earlier dialogues there occur two or three highly-wrought passages; instead of the ever-flowing play of humour, now appearing, now concealed, but always present, are inserted a good many bad jests, as we may venture to term them. We may observe an attempt at artificial ornament, and far-fetched modes of expression; also clamorous demands on the part of his companions, that Socrates shall answer his own questions, as well as other defects of style, which remind us of the Laws.

The Phaedrus is closely connected with the Symposium, and may be regarded either as introducing or following it. The two Dialogues together contain the whole philosophy of Plato on the nature of love, which in the Republic and in the later writings of Plato is only introduced playfully or as a figure of speech. But in the Phaedrus and Symposium love and philosophy join hands, and one is an aspect of the other. The spiritual and emotional part is elevated into the ideal, to which in the Symposium mankind are described as looking forward, and which in the Phaedrus, as well as in the Phaedo, they are seeking to recover from a former state of existence. Whether the subject of the Dialogue is love or rhetoric, or the union of the two, or the relation of philosophy to love and to art in general, and to the human soul, will be hereafter considered. And perhaps we may arrive at some conclusion such as the followingthat the dialogue is not strictly confined to a single subject, but passes from one to another with the natural freedom of conversation.

The Euthydemus, though apt to be regarded by us only as an elaborate jest, has also a very serious purpose. It may fairly claim to be the oldest treatise on logic; for that science originates in the misunderstandings which necessarily accompany the first efforts of speculation. Several of the fallacies which are satirized in it reappear in the Sophistici Elenchi of Aristotle and are retained at the end of our manuals of logic. But if the order of history were followed, they should be placed not at the end but at the beginning of them; for they belong to the age in which the human mind was first making the attempt to distinguish thought from sense, and to separate the universal from the particular or individual. How to put together words or ideas, how to escape ambiguities in the meaning of terms or in the structure of propositions, how to resist the fixed impression of an eternal being or perpetual flux, how to distinguish between words and thingsthese were problems not easy of solution in the infancy of philosophy. They presented the same kind of difficulty to the half-educated man which spelling or arithmetic do to the mind of a child. It was long before the new world of ideas which had been sought after with such passionate yearning was set in order and made ready for use.

The subject of the Charmides is Temperance, a peculiarly Greek notion, which may also be rendered Moderation (Compare Cic. Tusc. (Greek), quam soleo equidem tum temperantiam, tum moderationem appellare, nonnunquam etiam modestiam.), Modesty, Discretion, Wisdom, without completely exhausting by all these terms the various associations of the word. It may be described as mens sana in corpore sano, the harmony or due proportion of the higher and lower elements of human nature which makes a man his own master, according to the definition of the Republic. In the accompanying translation the word has been rendered in different places either Temperance or Wisdom, as the connection seemed to require: for in the philosophy of Plato (Greek) still retains an intellectual element and is not yet relegated to the sphere of moral virtue, as in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle.The beautiful youth, Charmides, who is also the most temperate of human beings, is asked by Socrates, What is Temperance? He answers characteristically, (1) Quietness.But Temperance is a fine and noble thing; and quietness in many or most cases is not so fine a thing as quickness.

Protagoras by Plato is a dialogue by Plato. The traditional subtitle (which may or may not be Platos) is "or the Sophists". The main argument is between Socrates and the elderly Protagoras, a celebrated sophist and philosopher.The discussion takes place at the home of Callias, who is host to Protagoras while he is in town, and concerns the nature of sophists, the unity and the teachability of virtue. A total of twenty-one people are named as present.The dialogue begins with an unnamed friend of Socrates asking him how his pursuit of the young Alcibiades, just now reputed to be growing his first beard, is proceeding. Socrates explains that while he has just been in the company of Alcibiades, his mind is now on more interesting matters. He says that the Sophist Protagoras, the wisest man alive (309cd), is in town.Socrates relates the story of how his young friend, Hippocrates, son of Apollodorus, came knocking on his door before daybreak and roused him out of bed. Hippocrates was in a big hurry to be present when Protagoras held court, as he was expected to do, at the home of Callias, and wanted Socrates to introduce him as a potential student to the old Sophist, as Protagoras had a great reputation as a teacher.

Meno by Plato Meno (/?mi?no?/; Greek: Μ?νων, Mén?n) is a Socratic dialogue by Plato. Meno begins the dialogue by asking Socrates whether virtue is taught, acquired by practice, or comes by nature.In

Parmenides by Plato (Greek: ?) is one of the dialogues of Plato. It is widely considered to be one of the most challenging and enigmatic of Platos dialogues.The Parmenides purports to be an account of a meeting between the two great philosophers of the Eleatic school, Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, and a young Socrates. The occasion of the meeting was the reading by Zeno of his treatise defending Parmenidean monism against those partisans of plurality who asserted that Parmenides supposition that there is a one gives rise to intolerable absurdities and contradictions.The dialogue is set during a supposed meeting between Parmenides and Zeno of Elea in Socrates hometown of Athens. This dialogue is chronologically the earliest of all as Socrates is only nineteen years old here. It is also notable that he takes the position of the student here while Parmenides serves as the lecturer.The whole dialogue is likely fictitious as Parmenides and Zeno of Elea lived in Southern Italy which was in the process of being colonized by Greeks at the time.

Phaedrus by Plato written by Plato, is a dialogue between Platos protagonist, Socrates, and Phaedrus, an interlocutor in several dialogues. The Phaedrus was presumably composed around 370 BCE, about the same time as Platos Republic and Symposium. Although ostensibly about the topic of love, the discussion in the dialogue revolves around the art of rhetoric and how it should be practiced, and dwells on subjects as diverse as metempsychosis (the Greek tradition of reincarnation) and erotic love.One of the dialogues central passages is the famous Chariot Allegory, which presents the human soul as composed of a charioteer, a good horse tending upward to the divine, and a bad horse tending downward to material embodiment.The dialogue consists of a series of three speeches on the topic of love that serves as the subject to construct a discussion on the proper use of rhetoric. They encompass discussions of the soul, madness, divine inspiration, and the practice and mastery of an art.As they walk out into the countryside, Socrates tries to convince Phaedrus to repeat the speech of Lysias which he has just heard. Phaedrus makes several excuses, but Socrates suspects strongly that Phaedrus has a copy of the speech with him.Saying that while Lysias is present, he would never allow himself to be used as a training partner for Phaedrus to practice his own speech-making on, he asks Phaedrus to expose what he is holding under his cloak. Phaedrus gives in and agrees to perform Lysias speech.

Euthyphro by Plato Euthyphro (/?ju??fro?/; Ancient Greek: ??, romanized: Euthyphr?n; c. 399395 BC), by Plato, is a Socratic dialogue whose events occur in the weeks before the trial of Socrates (399 BC), between Socrates and Euthyphro. The dialogue covers subjects such as the meaning of piety and justice. As is common with Platos earliest dialogues, it ends in aporia.In this dialogue, Socrates meets Euthyphro at the porch of the King Archon. Socrates tells him that he is preparing to go to court against the charges of Meletus on the grounds of impiety. Euthyphro tells Socrates that he is going to court himself to prosecute his father for binding a worker in chains and leaving him to die. This has granted him the ire of his own family who believe his father was in the right.The worker had killed a fellow worker and this they believe, exempts them from liability for leaving him bound in the ditch to starve to death. Since Euthyphro seems assured of himself, Socrates asks him to define piety. His help will clarify Socrates case in the courtroom. If Socrates is asked to define piety, he can simply rely on Euthyphros definition.This however leads to the main dilemma of the dialogue when the two cannot come to a satisfactory conclusion. Is something pious because God approves of it or does God approve of it because it is pious? This aporic ending has led to one of the strongest theological and meta-ethical debates in history.

Ion by Plato In Platos Ion (/?a??n/; Greek: ?) Socrates discusses with the titular character, a professional rhapsode who also lectures on Homer, the question of whether the rhapsode, a performer of poetry, gives his performance on account of his skill and knowledge or by virtue of divine possession. It is one of the shortest of Platos dialogues.Ion has just come from a festival of Asclepius at the city of Epidaurus, after having won first prize in the competition. Socrates engages him in discussion and Ion explains how his knowledge and skill is limited to Homer, whom he claims to understand better than anyone alive.Socrates finds this puzzling as to him it seems that Homer treats many of the same subjects as other poets like Hesiod, subjects such as war or divination, and that if someone is knowledgeable in any one of those he should be able to understand what both of these poets say. Furthermore, this man is probably not the poet, like Ion, but a specialist like a doctor, who knows better about nutrition."For not by art do they utter these things, but by divine influence; since, if they had fully learned by art to speak on one kind of theme, they would know how to speak on all. And for this reason God takes away the mind of these men and uses them as his ministers, just as he does soothsayers and godly seers, in order that we who hear them may know that it is not they who utter these words of great price, when they are out of their wits, but that it is God himself who speaks and addresses us through them." (534bd)

Gorgias by Plato Gorgias (/????rd?i?s/;[1] Greek: ?; 483375 BC)[2] was an ancient Greek sophist, pre-Socratic philosopher, and rhetorician who was a native of Leontinoi in Sicily. Along with Protagoras, he forms the first generation of Sophists. Several doxographers report that he was a pupil of Empedocles, although he would only have been a few years younger."Like other Sophists, he was an itinerant that practiced in various cities and giving public exhibitions of his skill at the great pan-Hellenic centers of Olympia and Delphi, and charged fees for his instruction and performances. A special feature of his displays was to ask miscellaneous questions from the audience and give impromptu replies." He has been called "Gorgias the Nihilist" although the degree to which this epithet adequately describes his philosophy is controversial.Gorgias was born circa 483 BC in Leontinoi, a Chalcidian colony in eastern Sicily that was allied with Athens. His fathers name was Charmantides. He had a brother named Herodicus, who was a physician, and sometimes accompanied him during his travels. He also had a sister, whose name is not known, but whose grandson dedicated a golden statue to his great uncle at Delphi.

Phaedo by Plato also known to ancient readers as On The Soul, is one of the best-known dialogues of Platos middle period, along with the Republic and the Symposium.The philosophical subject of the dialogue is the immortality of the soul. It is set in the last hours prior to the death of Socrates, and is Platos fourth and last dialogue to detail the philosophers final days, following Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito.One of the main themes in the Phaedo is the idea that the soul is immortal. In the dialogue, Socrates discusses the nature of the afterlife on his last day before being executed by drinking hemlock.Socrates has been imprisoned and sentenced to death by an Athenian jury for not believing in the gods of the state (though some scholars think it was more for his support of "philosopher kings" as opposed to democracy) and for corrupting the youth of the city.By engaging in dialectic with a group of Socrates friends, including the two Thebans, Cebes, and Simmias, Socrates explores various arguments for the souls immortality in order to show that there is an afterlife in which the soul will dwell following death. Phaedo tells the story that following the discussion, he and the others were there to witness the death of Socrates.The Phaedo was first translated into Latin from Greek by Henry Aristippus in 1160.