and the republic, while somewhat eye-opening, is nowhere near a "must read." plato and his ideal/absolutism is one of the worst philosophies ever.
I must congratulate you though, Oyolar, on not being blinded by the rhetoric surrounding a figure like Plato in our modern culture. I have a bunch of friends just getting back from the four year college thing and they are all SO sold on Plato it's ridiculous. None of them can accept it when I try to explain to them that he was essentially the grandmaster of his local Masonic lodge, hence the belief in socialism and eugenics. But it's just ridiculous because none of them have even read any of his dialogues in their entirety and they all just assume that he was some saint or visionary because their teachers painted a fancy mental picture of the guy for them. I picture all these college kids standing around at a kegger, having a race to shotgun beers, and then afterword smashing the can on their heads and screaming, "PLATOOOOOOOOO! WOOOOO!!!" lol
But look at this terrible Yale open courseware propaganda I stumbled across recently...
Listen to this shill bastard trying to enchant these poor naive college kids with communism and eugenics. How shameful. And the whole time you can tell that not even he believes what he's trying to sell. If someone were to ask either of us about the book I am more than willing to bet that you'd be able to just speak fluently on subject without glancing at a pre-written speech every other sntence, judging from your post here, and I know for a fact that I would be able to as well because neither of us would be fooling ourselves. This guy has to fool himself to be able to fool everyone else. What truly disturbs me is that this is a school for the rich elite who will undoubtedly grow up to become the managerial class of the world, and he claims that there will always be at least one person who will keep referring back to Plato's Republic. Now THAT is disconcerting. But it's just terrible the way he tries to characterize horrific concepts it in a positive light by saying things like, "Plato envisioned a world in which children would work closely with each other in life far from the supervision of their parents," undoubtedly resulting in a lot of the freshly liberated college kids who are on their own two feet for the first time being brainwashed with some sort of rhetoric akin to, "Awww! Freedom for the youth," when, in reality, PLATO says that NO CHILDREN WILL EVER BE ALLOWED TO KNOW THEIR PARENTS AND NO PARENTS ALLOWED TO KNOW THEIR OWN CHILDREN. I can't believe that people seriously think they're getting a legitimate "education" when it's being given to them by some of the richest people in the world who STILL charge an arm and a leg for it, not to mention the fact that all the textbooks are printed by the same handful of elite, aristocratic families. But hye, let's not forget that Yale is home to one of the most influential publicly-visible mystery cults: The Skull and Bones
Check out thsi video my friend Prentice uploaded to his myspace of some crazy asses who climbed up on the wall of "the tomb" as they call it and filmed part of the initiation ritual of the Bonesmen...
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=23565125