Plato Symposium Essay

Life is pink, or so says Louis Armstrong’s version of Edith Piaf’s beautiful French song, La Vie En Rose. Plato is arguably the most famous philosopher from Ancient Greece. The Symposium, one of Plato’s most famous works, is a brilliant piece of literature centered on a group of men telling their own versions of what they believe to be Love. The Goddess of Love however, is the main focus of Plato’s work more so than the act of actually being in love. This becomes the men’s main focal point for the

In Plato’s Symposium, sequential speeches praise the god of Love, but they stray from truth until Diotima’s speech provides a permanent form in which love “neither waxes nor wanes” (Sym. 211A). Through the speeches, love shifts from identifying with the concrete to the abstract, but still ultimately advances goals of present: Phaedrus sees love as helping “men gain virtue,” Aristophanes as only a “promise” to restore humans to their “original nature” and Pausanias and Eryximachus have to use two

attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.” Since the beginning of time, writers and philosophers have been trying to discover the origins of this “attack,” and many attribute different reasons for this immense feeling. In both Plato’s Symposium, and Ovid’s The Art of Love, Aristophanes and Ovid attempt to address the genesis of love by asking: what is the feeling that drives us towards another human: Is it physical attraction? Sexual desire? Experience in the field of dating? Or is this

Zeus did not find this to be in his best interest because of how we behaved so he split each being in two. As a result of this split we must now go about our lives in search of our other half. This is the speech that Aristophanes gave in Plato’s Symposium a book composed of various speeches from many different famous Greek people. Aristophanes’ view of love is compelling because it describes our very human nature to find our love, it justifies the reasoning of why there are different sexualities,

imbibing wine in events known as symposiums, the Greek would discuss intellectual ideas which lead to the acceleration of knowledge. In some cases, the symposia weren’t only for poetry and discussion, the symposiarch would hire woman for entertaining purposes. The woman would play instruments, dance, or even engage in sexual encounters with the men livening up the event with culture and music. Unfortunately, this was the only way woman could partake in symposiums due to cultural norms regarding their

Diotima, Socrates' great teacher from the Symposium, a work by Plato was one of the most influential women thinkers of all time, whether she was a real person or a literary fictional character. She related to Socrates the theory of love that he described to the partygoers at Agathon's banquet, a celebration of Agathon's victory at the competition of Dionysis in Athens and of Eros. Before we search for the idea of why Diotima is a woman, we should first discuss a little about her. We know that

Diotima, Socrates' great teacher from the Symposium, a work by Plato was one of the most influential women thinkers of all time, whether she was a real person or a literary fictional character. She related to Socrates the theory of love that he described to the partygoers at Agathon's banquet, a celebration of Agathon's victory at the competition of Dionysis in Athens and of Eros.      Before we search for the idea of why Diotima is a woman, we should first discuss a little

Starting at 210a of The Symposium, Diotima speaks with Socrates about reaching the final vision of the mysteries. She starts talking about a young boy who is starting to be attracted to beautiful bodies. He first loves one body; and then, realizing that all bodies are relatively alike, he begins to love all beautiful bodies. After that, he comes to appreciate the beauty of minds, not caring anymore about physical attraction. After all stages, the boy will ultimately come to loving beauty itself and

Venus Venus, our sister planet once thought to be beautiful and was named after the Greek Goddess of Love. However, this Goddess did not show what it was truly like due to the telescopes not being clear or powerful. The ancient astronomers could not see past the cloud cover of Venus. Most of the questions about Venus back then was when and how it was Venus formed, why did the Mynas have such fascination with Venus, next will be the atmosphere, followed by its place in our solar system. When the

model Plato would readily accept as this interpretation of wholeness is fleshed out in greater detail certainly seem Platonic especially as this idea of wholeness is presented in a speech in the Symposium, and it is of intrigue as to why it never became a part of the soul Plato set out to define. Perhaps it was too much for him to interfere with the parallel between the city and the soul that he describes earlier in this work and their reliance on three parts. Or, as Cooper asks, was Plato meaning