Plato’s Ion
A dialogue about the nature of knowledge
The Practical Wisdom podcast I produce is not for the faint of heart. Each series of episodes presents a deep dive into a single text from the Greco-Roman wisdom tradition. From time to time, as in the case of this post, it may helpful to pause and collect together all the entries referring to the same piece of classical writing, so that people listeners can go back to them at their leisure, listen to them in sequence, and gain a broader appreciation of what they are about.
Today I submit to you with a collection of links to my commentary of Plato’s Ion, a strange short dialogue that pauses the question of whether poets know what they are talking about. Let me explain. Socrates meets the title character, Ion, who is a rhapsode, that is one of those people who went around declaiming poetry that they had not written. Ion’s specialty is Homer.
The rhapsodes didn’t just recite, though, they lectured, explaining to people all sorts of technical subjects as they understood them from studying poets like Homer. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to us today, but we are talking about a period of western history when poetry and mythology were not just art forms but sources of knowledge and understanding.
Then in the sixth century BCE a new kid appeared on the block: philosophy! Presocratics…
