#plato

Go back to Plato's First Alcibiades: the question is how to gain political power, and then Socrates raises how to wield it rightly. The last thing Socrates says, after Alcibiades agrees to follow him in philosophy, is: ἀλλὰ τὴν τῆς πόλεως ὁ…

I think Book 1 is setting us up. It reminds us at least twice that Aristotle is looking at things in the conventional way, how people normally consider them — and then he sets that aside to “make a new beginning,” much as Plato does in the …

Aristotle is keen on the difference between merely living and living well — which is just where Plato's Republic begins. Socrates entertains the “city of swine” but laughs it off as insufficient to man's end: merely to live is not enough; f…