This class is focused on six key dialogues by Plato: the Ion, Meno, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. We will be devoting eight weeks, and eight online class sessions to exploring the ideas, arguments, assumptions, and dramatic features of these dialogues. Each of these is an important work for understanding Plato's overall philosophy, and each of them also focus in on some key feature of that approach as well.

You will no doubt notice that four of these dialogues figure into what is often called "the last days of Socrates", centered on the period from just before his trial to the day of his execution. What they show us is not just what Socrates (as Plato portrays him) thought about matters, and his approach to discussing philosophy, but also his way of life and commitment and his interactions with his friends. In the other two, we get to see Socrates engaging in a characteristic way with people who present themselves as possessing knowledge or wisdom, but who turn out not to be able to provide that.

There are some other important topics that we will be looking into during our class, one of which is understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the dialogue format Plato deliberately uses. We will also be discussing why Socrates at times makes what we can determine to be weak or bad arguments with certain of his interlocutors, and how we might strengthen those arguments.

In the course of our study, we will be working within a number of sub-disciplines of philosophy that Plato's philosophy makes contributions to, including epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics.

We will be studying all of these topics over the course of eight weeks and eight 90-minute class sessions. That turns out, based on my experience teaching these texts, to be about the right amount of time to work through this material in a systematic and leisurely way together. By the end of this class, you will have a solid and well-developed understanding of Plato's position on the topics examined in these dialogues, and Plato's general approach in philosophy. This should be useful if you decide to go on and study some of the many other works by Plato.