None
3 stars
Paedophilia.
Also, the idea that writing is bad is in here? A bit ironic.
With that said, even in my least favorite of all of Socrates' dialogues so far, I still enjoyed quite a few gems in this. The first 2/3 were about love (specifically, love for a man and his boy), and the last 1/3 is about defining what rhetoric is and should do, including some interesting tangents, particularly the one about how writing is inferior to oral discourse as you can't debate with the writing and it needs its author to defend itself. Of course this argument is kind of laughable to me but still...interesting.
Some of the other interesting things are...
244A madness gets a bad rap
246E reference to man's fallen nature, which apparently was present in Greek mythology before Greek culture was influenced by Christianity
248D Socrates believed people had personality types, basically, although he …
Paedophilia.
Also, the idea that writing is bad is in here? A bit ironic.
With that said, even in my least favorite of all of Socrates' dialogues so far, I still enjoyed quite a few gems in this. The first 2/3 were about love (specifically, love for a man and his boy), and the last 1/3 is about defining what rhetoric is and should do, including some interesting tangents, particularly the one about how writing is inferior to oral discourse as you can't debate with the writing and it needs its author to defend itself. Of course this argument is kind of laughable to me but still...interesting.
Some of the other interesting things are...
244A madness gets a bad rap
246E reference to man's fallen nature, which apparently was present in Greek mythology before Greek culture was influenced by Christianity
248D Socrates believed people had personality types, basically, although he doesn't exactly come up with an exact system
250B effusive prasie of viewing the glorious transcendent pure forms
251B Love gives your soul its wings back
259B Myth about muses & cicadas
270D Rhetoric targets the soul; therefore we must understand the soul first in order to know what is good or bad rhetoric.
272D Good rhetoricians argue by what is likely, not by what is true.
274E An Egyptian myth (or one invented by Plato but attributed to them) re the invention of writing and discussion of it between two gods
275C Downsides of writing
279B An example given of Socrates praying; here he's praying to Pan
