Nothing in This World Is Real | Angie Hobbs on Plato
Angie Hobbs is Professor Emerita of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, where she held the world's first chair of that title. She works on ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Plato, and on how it bears on contemporary questions. Alongside her academic work she has taught the Socratic method in schools and to the UK civil service, and appears regularly on radio and television. Her books include Plato and the Hero, and most recently Why Plato Matters Now, which she also narrated for audiobook. She is currently writing a book on heroes and heroism. In this conversation we discuss what Plato was reacting against, from the Sophists to the materialism of Democritus, and why he took Heraclitus and Parmenides seriously but not the atomists. We look at the problem of separating Plato from Socrates in the dialogues, and why Plato wrote in dialogue form and never in his own voice. We turn to the Republic and Thrasymachus's claim that justice is the interest of the stronger, the charge from Popper and Berlin that Plato was a totalitarian, and the fact that the Republic itself would be banned under its own censorship rules. On the Symposium we cover the competing accounts of love, Aristophanes' fable of the divided spheres, Diotima's ladder and the image of the pregnant philosopher, Alcibiades' account of trying to seduce Socrates. We also discuss the theory of forms and how much of Plato's ethics survives without it, his time with the Pythagoreans and what mathematics and musical harmony meant to him, Nietzsche's charge that Plato was a life-denier, what Christianity took from Plato and what it changed, and how much of the Plato we read is the historical one.