Trying to figure out why it’s named after him, I also learned that shapes such as cubes, octahedrons, etc. are Platonic solids, also named after him.
Apparently these things were just something he was philosophising a lot about, but it was not he who decided to call them that.
Apparently everyone thought having terms to describe friendship, even though he had written extensively on the different types of “love”. It seems like a put down, but if everyone else thought friendship wasn’t worth considering at the time, he’s probably pleased that people now think his time well spent.
In his two dialogues that deal directly with love, he excludes sexual relations either implicitly or explicitly. In “Sympsium” love (eros) allows you to reach an understanding of the form of the ‘Beautiful’, and love creates goodness, and people can only ‘give birth’ (besides physically, also mentally by creating things) in goodness, so that’s why they seek it, to create and achieve some immortality through their creations.
In “Phaedrus” he explicitly tells how one of the three parts of the soul (mind) is a wild horse that pulls the soul in lust, and reason (the charioteer) then proceeds to pull back with all its might as the emotional part of the soul goes towards sex, as love is there to remind the soul of beauty, which is the souls nourishment, not to “mount [others] like an animal”. That’s basically the tl;dr of his writings on love in those two dialogoues.
Platonic solids are solids Plato mentioned in “Timaeus”.
I read this immediately after posting a link to the Oracle scene in The Matrix in another thread. In that scene, the Oracle has “temet nosce” on a plaque above her door and points it out to Neo.
Anyway, weird coincidence.
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“You see, we are both platonic solids, but I’m a tetrahedron and she’s an octahedron, so we’re just not sexually compatible.”
I think he would be more surprised by the fact that Trump was president of the united states. Of course first you would have to explain to him what ‘President’ is. And who’s Trump. And what reality TV is. And TV. And where’s America.
I think he’d be more likely to say, “See! This is why democracy is a shitty idea. Think about how stupid the average person is. Now think that half of them are stupider than that. And you want to let them vote?” ‘The Republic’, Plato
Would be funny if after you explained all this, he sided with Trump somehow. Might be an interesting premise for a novel.
Well, he did think democracy is wrong…
