Plato: Alcibiades 1: Socrates on Justice, War, Self-Knowledge and Government
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New video about Alcibiades, a book by the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato. It’s a dialogue between Socrates and Alcibiades about the importance of self-knowledge for participating in political life, how to define justice, how experience in war influences this, apparent differences between how men and women define justice, the potential costs of having friends as a politician, and the dangerous potential of government power:
Check out my last Mindgasms Quickie about how and why the public intellectual and clinical psychologist, Jordan Peterson, is wrong about the famous mistranslation of Derrida, “There is nothing outside the text.” The actual line was “There is nothing outside the context,” meaning that every book and everything in general has a relevant context. Peterson goes on from this mistranslation to claim that Derrida, Foucualt, and other so-called Postmodernists are relativists who argue that every interpretation of a work is valid. In reality, they were pluralists who thought that there are multiple valid interpretations of a text, yet some are more so than others. The most correct ones change over time, due to multiple factors that endlessly change the relevant context, such as culture, history, etc:
Here’s the link for my playlist with all of my Mindgasms Quickies so far:
Check out my second video on the Stoic philosopher named Epictetus’s book called “The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness.” This maxim is “Recognize Appearances for What They Really Are.” It’s all about remembering that things that are unpleasant to us are not what they appear to be, and that we should train ourselves to only care about these things that appear to be unpleasant if they are within our control. We should try very hard to avoid being annoyed by things that seem unpleasant to us if they are outside of our control. This relates to the first maxim that I made a video about, which is “Know What You Can Control and What You Can’t.”
Check out my playlist with every video in my series on Epictetus’ “The Art of Living” so far:
