Plato’s Republic 9: Horny for the Good

Summary

This episode covers book 7 of Plato's Republic

Socrates is what I call a “philosopher of desire.” He cares more about the questions than the answers, the journey than the destination, the boner than the nut.

And he brings that energy to his teaching.

In this episode, Socrates tells the boys that the “form of the good” is the one thing that anyone who wants to live a good life absolutely needs to know about. So what is it? Glaucon wants to know so badly he yells out to Apollo and begs Socrates to tell him. But Socrates won’t go all the way. Instead, he teases Glaucon with the analogies of the sun, line and cave which also happen to tell us about: the invisible forms; the nature of human knowledge; and why STEM subjects should only be used as prep for philosophy.

Get your goggles on, because this is a deep one.

 Credits

Adeimantus: Rebecca Amzallag

Glaucon: Zachary Amzallag

Ancient music: Michael Levy

Intro theme: Clayton Tapp

Outro: C+C Music Factory

Episode art and editing: Sep

Transcript

Note: this is transcribed using an online transcription service so it’s probably going to have a lot of errors. We do don’t have time to go through these all carefully but still thought that it would be more helpful than having no transcript at all.