What is Beauty? (Plato) - a podcast by Dre Carlan

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“But I should like to know whether you mean that there are certain ideas of which all other things partake, and from which they derive their names; that similars, for example, become similar, because they partake of similarity; and great things become great, because they partake of greatness; and that just and beautiful things become just and beautiful, because they partake of justice and beauty?”
-Parmenides


“The lovers of sounds and sights, I replied, are, as I conceive, fond of fine tones and colors and forms and all the artificial products that are made out of them, but their minds are incapable of seeing or loving absolute beauty...and he who, having a sense of beautiful things has no sense of absolute beauty, or who, in another lead him to a knowledge of that beauty is unable to follow—of such a one I ask, Is he awake or in a dream only?...”
-Republic, 5.476b-c


“Why then, Socrates, do I lose attention and go to sleep and have absolutely no ideas of the least value, when any one speaks of any other poet; but when Homer is mentioned, I wake up at once and am all attention and have plenty to say?”
“The reason, my friend, is obvious. No one can fail to see that you speak of Homer without any art or knowledge. If you were able to speak of him by rules of art, you would have been able to speak of all other poets; for poetry is a whole.”
-Ion, 532b


“There is poetry, which, as you know, is complex and manifold. All creation or passage or non-being into being is poetry or making, and the processes of all art are creative; and the masters of arts are all poets or makers. Still, you know that they are not called poets, but have other names; only that portion of the art which is separated off from the rest, and is concerned with music and metre, is termed poetry, and they who possess poetry in this sense of the word are called poets”.
-Symposium, 205

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