Plato Scholarship

Question 1

Christine Garside Allen (On women in Plato’s work)

Answer 1

“The attempt to understand Plato’s views on women is complicated … For the most part they are absent. In the Symposium, Diotima emerges as Socrates’ teacher..”

Question 2

Mary Balfour (On Aristophanes’ spheres)

Answer 2

“I think it‘s a very modern idea in a way, because his story incorporates people being gay, and all aspects of modern sexuality.”

Question 3

Jowett (On Plato’s political ideas)

Answer 3

“The ideas expounded by Plato advocate an approach towards politics that may be described, in Karl Poppers words, as utopian social engineering.”

Question 4

Donald Levy (On the Symposium)

Answer 4

”..it exposes the presuppositions of Greek sexual morality to the sort of critical scrutiny practiced by Socrates..”

Question 5

Julia Annas (On Plato as a ‘feminist’)

Answer 5

”..in [The Republic] Plato proposes that not only should women share men’s tasks but also that the nuclear family should be abolished.”