Core Ideas
The Forms, the soul, knowledge and virtue — the arguments Plato is read for.
Plato is read, twenty-four centuries on, for a handful of arguments that refuse to die. The tripartite soul — reason, spirit and the appetitive part — is still the shape most accounts of self-control take. The Theory of Forms is still the first serious answer to what universals are, and Platonic idealism still names a live position.
The essays here take the arguments one at a time: what each claims, how Plato argues for it, and where it bends or breaks under pressure.
122 essays, listed alphabetically.
