>>24558636
>the Dialogues were not particularly important
Again though I mean important *simply as Dialogues*. They were jumping-off points for huge autism commentaries which go way beyond anything that's in the dialogue itself.
>>24558618
> Plato, unlike his student Aristotle, who could afford to be bolder with the Macedonians protecting him, recognized that philosophy could not safely be practiced in full openness in a world that put Socrates to death, but that the philosopher had to be cognizant of who they're speaking with, and under what circumstances. I'd have thought that someone proud of careful study of Aristotle would have grasped the appropriateness of this reserved, cautious, or circumstantially appropriate manner by study of the Rhetoric or recalling what Aristotle says about irony in the
Plato openly fantasizes about overthrowing the state in multiple places, so he was not particularly cautious. He criticizes democracy constantly. The real difference here is dialectic vs demonstration, not esoteric vs exoteric writing. So again you're weaving together half-truths into a simple narrative without thinking about what you're saying.
>but only the explicit arguments matter to you, like a modern analytic
Don't you ever call me a 'modern analytic' again. I do however care about arguments and what authors are actually saying, you are very muddle-minded, which is why you like the Dialogues so much. You're like Theodorus in the Theaetetus, who prefers the funny stories to the labor of the concept.
> If you had bothered to compare what the Seventh Letter says with the Phaedrus' latter half on speeches, rhetoric, and writing, you would've glimpsed an important suggestion for how to take the dialogues, and if you had bothered to actually read the Republic with the care you apparently expend on Aristotle, you would've seen how Plato there qualifies the seeming teaching about the Good and why he needs to present it to someone politically ambitious like Glaucon. But you have apparently no questions about human psychology or motivation, so it never occurs to you to notice that the Republic takes place in the house of a man murdered by the politically ambitious utopian Thirty Tyrants.
Case in point right here. I don't doubt for a second that Plato believed in/had actually experienced the Vision of the Good and that he thought philosophy could take you there. The problem is you people get so attached to this mystical lore that you're not really interested in the arguments - that's all window-dressing for the likes of you. So you're happy to stay in this shallow, literary/poetic analysis of these lovely Dialogues and you actively discourage people from studying scientific philosophers like Aristotle or even Plotinus because it's "boring", "autistic", "mere argumentation", and so on.

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I tried reading the Greeks. I couldn't.