Sugrue, Michael. Great Courses Audio.

Great courses on tape (Audiocassette)

Read by Michael Sugrue

These 16 lectures bring the Socratic quest for truth alive and explore ideas that are as vital today as they were 25 centuries ago - ideas about truth, justice, love, beauty, courage, and wisdom that can change lives and reveal the world in new ways. Here, you'll delve into the inner structure, action, and meaning of 17 of Plato's greatest dialogues, making these lectures an indispensable companion for anyone interested in philosophy in general or Platonic thought in particular. As you'll learn, the dialogues share some general characteristics - and they all breathe with the feeling, the tension, and even the humor of great theater. Even if you don't have time to reacquaint yourself directly with Platonic texts, you'll benefit enormously from these lectures' insights into the depths of reflection opened by Socrates and Plato - arguably the most important teacher-student pairing in history. You'll become engrossed in "the romance of the intellect," as Professor Sugrue opens a path for you into the inner structure and action of these selected dialogues, for millennia the objects of devoted study by the noblest minds. These lectures offer no easy answers. What they give instead is much better: an introduction to Platonic "meta-education," the art not of what to think but of how to think. You'll see the stunning subtlety with which Plato weaves together the strengths of philosophy and poetry, dialectic and drama, word and action. And you'll catch a glimpse of the "serious playfulness" that Socrates says the search for the good, the true, and the beautiful can inspire in the human soul. All Lectures: 1. The Domain of the Dialogues 2. What Socratic Dialogue Is Not 3. The Examined Life 4. Tragedy in the Philosophic Age of the Greeks 5. Republic I - Justice, Power, and Knowledge 6. Republic II-V - Soul and City 7. Republic VI-X - The Architecture of Reality 8. Laws - The Legacy of Cephalus 9. Protagoras - The Dialectic of the Many and the One 10. Gorgias - The Temptation to Speak 11. Parmenides - Most True 12. Sophist and Statesman - The Formal Disintegration of Justice 13. Phaedrus - Hymn to Love 14. Symposium - The Pride of Love 15. The Platonic Achievement 16. The Living Voice

Mode of access: World Wide Web