Plato's Pod: Dialogues on the works of Plato

Book II builds on Book I's link of virtue and happiness, asking how children are educated toward virtue and instilled with a sense of it, centring on judging the pleasure and pain that motivate behaviour.

Book III opens with natural cataclysms and the emergence of early human communities, and turns to concord between the extremes of pain and pleasure and reason, education, proportion and a common sense of virtue among citizens.

Book IV has the Athenian, Clinias and Megillus discuss virtuous leadership for the new colony's establishment, where the Athenian holds God, defined in Book X as Reason and the universe's origin, to be the measure of all.

Socrates and Protarchus open the Philebus by distinguishing the one from the many in categorization, seeking the ratio of knowledge to pleasure in the good life through number and calculation.

The Statesman's Visitor from Elea likens statesmen to herdsmen directing followers' souls, discussed alongside Robert Kennedy's 1966 Ripple of Hope speech and whether any natural separation exists between ruler and ruled.

The Visitor from Elea distinguishes being, an eternal changeless realm, from becoming, the continuously changing physical world, and the group revisited Socrates's proposition in the Phaedo that that which is not is unspeakable and unthinkable.

Plato's Pod begins its series on the Laws with Book X's cosmology, where the unnamed Athenian argues the immaterial soul is older than physical matter and therefore the primary cause of all motion.

Concluding the Sophist, the Visitor from Elea argues that is not means only different from that which is, so many differences exist within one form of existence, with the host offering his own definition of the forms.

The final meeting on the Laws covers Book XII's Nocturnal Council, guarding the virtue of Magnesia's citizens and leaders, and revisits Book X's claim that Reason sits at the very centre of the universe.

Wrongly convicted and facing execution in two days, Socrates tells Crito in Plato's dialogue that it is not right to take the laws into his own hands after benefiting from Athenian society for seventy years.

Concluding Plato's Phaedo, which ends with Socrates's execution, the group asks whether the mind causes physical outcomes, and Socrates argues the soul, as the Form of life, is deathless and eternal since life's opposite is death.

Book VI has the Athenian, Clinias and Megillus design a mixed democratic and monarchical government for Magnesia, with every citizen choosing the Guardians of the Laws through rigorous vetting while Crete oversees the new colony's founding.

Timaeus, from 48(a), introduces Necessity as a container for the limits of Becoming and the four elements of earth, fire, water and air, raising whether physical objects or intelligence came first in the universe.

Plato's Sophist is read for its method of continuous division of expertise into opposites, with the Visitor from Elea warning that the worst ignorance is not knowing yet thinking that one knows.

In the first session on Plato's Phaedo, Socrates presents the properties of the soul hours before his execution, arguing the soul exists before birth though its disintegration on death remains unresolved at 77(c).

The second part of Plato's Phaedrus, from 257(c) to the end, asks whether speech exists to direct the soul, examining the legend of Thamus and Theuth and Socrates's call to divide a concept into kinds.

In Book IX the Athenian, Clinias and Megillus address administering justice for evil acts in Crete's new colony, proposing reasoned preambles to laws and a doctor's treatment by education, with a death penalty warranted in certain cases.

Socrates prescribes number and calculation as the philosopher's first order of knowledge in the Republic, followed by geometry and astronomy, distinguishing the philosopher's reason from the Guardians' restricted, visible knowledge.

Plato's Meno opens with Meno's question of whether virtue can be taught, and Socrates proclaims knowledge to be recollection and the account of the reasons why.

Book I of the Laws argues for a constitution cultivating virtue in a new colony's citizens, unlike Crete's war-focussed constitution and the laws of Sparta, building on Book X's presentation of the universe's soul and Reason.

Passages 412(b) to 445(e) of the Republic cover Socrates, Adeimantus and Glaucon on the guardians and auxiliaries who protect the city, then the four virtues sought first in the city and then in the soul.

Season two opens on the Republic's allegory of the cave, simile of the sun, nature of the good and divided line at 502(d) to 521(b), recalling the question raised in the Theaetetus, whether man is the measure of all.

Plato's Theaetetus is discussed alongside a Joy of x interview by mathematician Steven Strogatz of computer scientist Melanie Mitchell, connected to Socrates's challenge to the Protagorean belief that man is the measure of all.

Book VII of the Laws has the Athenian, Clinias and Megillus discuss raising Magnesia's children, from the harmony of laws with customs to how appreciating number and shape can reveal collective potential in the universe.

Socrates's claim that cities have no rest from evils until philosophers rule is examined alongside the guardians' founding myth, or noble lie, and how the soul finds knowledge of an eternal form like beauty.

Book II of the Republic has Glaucon challenge Socrates to define justice without reference to outcomes, building a theoretical city and asking whether the Ring of Gyges would tempt anyone toward injustice.

Plato's Theaetetus is explored through physicist Richard Feynman's account of acquiring knowledge, and the spiral of the geometer Theodorus, who joins Socrates in dialogue with the mathematician Theaetetus, raises whether Plato implies a relationship between geometry and knowledge.

The Timaeus, to 30(d), opens with Socrates unable to picture the idealized city of the Republic in motion before Plato turns to Atlantis and Timaeus's division of the universe into Being and Becoming.

Plato's Protagoras opens on whether virtue can be taught, with the sophist Protagoras selling his knowledge of it against Socrates's position that virtue cannot be taught, a battle of words that continues in a second part.

Socrates in the Phaedo, at 77(d) to 98(b), argues the soul finds wisdom freed from the body's motion, and distinguishes composite visible objects from the soul, which is noncomposite and invisible.

The final session on the Republic examines Socrates's proof of the soul's immortality and the myth of Er, asking whether justice originates in the soul before the city and whether time is cyclic.

Plato's Charmides is read for Socrates's words that living scientifically was not enough without the one science of good and evil, asking whether knowledge of all knowledge, including of non-knowledge, is logically possible.

With Michael Fitzpatrick

James Myers and Michael Fitzpatrick discuss modern Platonist Alain Badiou's philosophy of the event, connecting his ideas on truth, choice and exception to today's polarized politics and Plato's allegory of the cave.

The second half of Book I has the Athenian, Clinias and Megillus conclude that mastering pain and pleasure through self control and courage equips Magnesia's citizens both to govern and be governed.

The second half of Book X sets out reason as the primary cause of the universe, and debates the death penalty for a citizen who, after every attempt at explanation and reconciliation, refuses to acknowledge reason as a god.

Plato's Critias tells of Atlantis, a wealthy society descended from the god Poseidon that lost its harmony to material wealth and brought upon itself the punishment of Zeus, disappearing in a great earthquake 9,000 years earlier.

Socrates holds virtue unteachable while Protagoras claims qualifications as its teacher, and the session asks whether virtue is a single entity or a range of connected attributes, and whether all knowledge is recollection as Socrates stated in the Meno.

Plato's Critias asks whether Atlantis's cataclysmic fall nine millennia earlier was real or a model civilization warning against the lust for possessions, drawing parallels to the Meno, Timaeus and Phaedrus.

Book XII of the Laws has the Athenian, Clinias and Megillus propose scrutineers who review but do not legislate, to oversee Magnesia's Guardians of the Laws and guard the colony against foreign influence.

Book XI shifts tone from Book X to the Athenian's thirty-three laws on trade and property in Magnesia, including a harsh penalty letting any passer-by over thirty beat a seller who quotes two prices in a day.

The Timaeus passages from 53(a) to 72(d) cover sensory perception, triangles and the five Platonic solids that Plato revealed 2,400 years ago, with a question raised about a triangle at the sphere's very centre.

Speeches by Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates relating Diotima's wisdom raise whether love is the mortal search for the universe's immortality, expressed between humans and by philosophers as lovers of wisdom.

Concluding the Protagoras, the sophist argues virtue is not a matter of knowledge while Socrates concludes it is, contradicting his own earlier view that virtue is unteachable in what Socrates calls a topsy-turvy result.

Concluding the Philebus, Socrates ranks measurement first among skills and distinguishes the philosopher's arithmetic from everyday mathematics, touching on the values of zero and one-half in the soul's recollection of unity.

In Plato's Statesman the Visitor from Elea equates ruling with fabric-weaving, measuring the fabric to its mean between extremes, discussed alongside a legislator's vow that hate will lose.

In Plato's Ion, Socrates tells the poet Homer's proponent Ion that since Homer represented an idea, Ion represents Homer's representation, comparing the divine power moving souls to a magnetic stone drawing iron rings.

Socrates and Protarchus open the Philebus by concluding the good life consists of a mixture of knowledge and pleasure, and the question becomes the ratio of that mixture, in which the soul applies calculation, reason and memory.

The first session on Plato's Parmenides has Parmenides and Xeno train the young Socrates in dialectic to identify a first principle, raising the third man argument's infinite regress in logic.

Plato's Euthyphro, about to prosecute his own father for impiety, prompts Socrates to mention his accuser Meletus, raising the Euthyphro dilemma: is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is loved.

The first part of Plato's Timaeus, to 47(e), discusses the creation of the intelligent universe, with the logical flow that begins at 28(a) of the dialogue reviewed early in the second episode.

Timaeus, from 30(d) to 47(e), explains a universe centred on the soul, distinguishing the timeless realm of Being from the physical realm of Becoming while participants compared today's atomic model to his spherical universe.

Continuing from 28(a) to 33(d), Plato's Timaeus turns to the shape of the physical universe observable by intelligence, with Timaeus naming three types at 50(d): that which comes to be, that in which, and that after which.

The drunken Alcibiades erupts in love for Socrates as Plato's Symposium closes with the practical after six abstract speeches, and the discussion compared Alcibiades to the prisoner in the cave of the Republic.

Plato's Greater Hippias contrasts the boastful sophist Hippias's claimed intelligence with the Cratylus's definition of wisdom as knowledge of motion, showing Hippias's illogical attempt to measure fine and foul in physical objects.

Three speeches on love among Plato's hungover Athenians at the symposium are examined for a common thread, asking whether love is a god that rules over humans or one that humans are free to fashion.

In Book V the unnamed Athenian alone addresses Clinias and Megillus on the soul as master over the body, moderating pains and pleasures, and ends with the proposal that 5,040 is the ideal population of a community.

Concluding the Statesman, the Visitor from Elea describes a ruler who harmonizes courage and temperance, and the episode asks whether such a ruler should be constrained by older laws, alongside Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Socrates examines the perception of being without limit in the names applied to the gods, and the group asks whether anything stands fast or all is flux, as Heraclitus believed, and tests the word democracy.

With Michael Fitzpatrick

James Myers and Michael Fitzpatrick relate the Republic, the Laws, the Statesman and the Meno to leadership, education, wealth and social cohesion in a technologically powered world of 8 billion people, seeking a path to the common good.

Socrates and Protarchus search in the Philebus for the causes of the soul's pleasure, distinguishing memory experienced with the body from recollection experienced by the soul alone, and asking where reason finds the common element.

Concluding three sessions on the Cratylus, the group traces Socrates's assertion that a proper account of the meaning of complex ideas exchanged by language requires knowledge of an object's nature and its uses in different times of human convention.

With Lantern Jack

Season two concludes on Plato's Parmenides and its claim that if the one is not, nothing is, exploring the instant of time when neither change nor rest exist through an analogy to quantum superposition.

Plato's Cratylus is examined for the origin of names and whether words originate in nature or by human convention, asking if man is the measure and how wisdom is distinguished from foolishness.

With Michael Fitzpatrick

Michael Fitzpatrick and the group conclude discussing Plato's Seventh Letter, where Plato never published his opinions so a soul's own thoughts must be born afresh, leaving the Meno's question of whether virtue can be taught unanswered.

Plato's Lesser Hippias has the title character unable to separate cause and effect in the motions of time, challenging Hippias and the reader to measure the difference between truth and lie, 2,400 years later.

Plato's Letters VI and VIII are read as a trilogy with Letter VII, where a good king is the servant of the laws and justice, and Letter VI calls on the Academy to befriend a king who respects reason.

With Michael Fitzpatrick

James Myers and Michael Fitzpatrick relate Alfred North Whitehead's perspectives to Plato's dialogues, including the Sophist, the Timaeus and the Philebus, and follow his path from ancient principles to the discoveries of Albert Einstein and Nils Bohr.

With Michael Fitzpatrick

James Myers and Michael Fitzpatrick introduce Alfred North Whitehead, a mathematician who became a philosophy professor at Harvard without a philosophy degree, and whose process philosophy relates the oneness of all to the continual becoming of many.

Plato's best known Seventh Letter recounts his experience teaching the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse and the philosophically minded Dion, with Plato succeeding with Dion and failing with Dionysius, a warning against rulers who do not practise philosophy.

James Myers applies the logic of characters across ten of Plato's dialogues to argue that artificial intelligence is impossible, because Plato's message is that intelligence develops only in a soul, on the basis of the soul's understanding of motion.

James Myers introduces season 3 and Plato's Cratylus by reviewing the Theory of Forms from the first two seasons, asking whether today's machine language technology can be distinguished from human words.

James Myers examines eight of Plato's works on how word meanings shape constitutions and justice, from Socrates's execution over two words to a Supreme Court dispute now hanging on three words evolved since 1789.

The first part of Plato's Phaedrus, to 257(b), asks whether bringing many perceptions into a reasoned unity requires understanding speech in terms of general forms, exploring the soul's multifaceted nature.