Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Symposium (Librovox)
    The Symposium (Librovox)
    The Symposium (Librovox)
    Audiobook2 hours

    The Symposium (Librovox)

    Written by Plato

    Narrated by LibriVox Community

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The Symposium is a philosophical book written by Plato sometime after 385 BCE. On one level the book deals with the genealogy, nature and purpose of love, on another level the book deals with the topic of knowledge, specifically how does one know what one knows. The topic of love is taken up in the form of a group of speeches, given by a group of men at a symposium or a wine drinking party at the house of the tragedian Agathon at Athens. Plato constructed the Symposium as a story within a story within a story. This architecture creates the space for Plato to build his philosophy of knowledge. The speech of Socrates points out that the highest purpose of Love is to become a Philosopher, or Lover of Wisdom. (Summary from Wikipedia)

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLibriVox
    Release dateAug 25, 2014
    The Symposium (Librovox)
    Author

    Plato

    Plato, one of the most renowned ancient Greek philosophers, was born in 427 B.C. to an aristocratic and wealthy family, which played a prominent part in Athenian politics. Plato in conjunction his teacher, Socrates, and his pupil, Aristotle helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and culture. While primarily influenced by Socrates, Plato’s work was also affected by the philosophies of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans. Under the guidance of Socrates, Plato devoted himself to the pursuit of wisdom and upon Socrates’ death, joined a group of the Socratic disciples gathered at Megara. Later he travelled in Egypt, Magna Graecia, and Sicily. He returned to Athens and founded a school, known as the Academy, which seems to have been his home base for the remainder of his life. While thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters have traditionally been ascribed to Plato, modern scholarship doubts the authenticity of some of them. His early dialogues are also known as the Socratic dialogues and include Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, and Protagoras. He followed these with his transitional dialogues: Gorgias, Meno , and Euthydemus . The Symposium and the Republic are considered the centerpieces of Plato's middle period and are considered some of his most revered work, and other middle dialogues include Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus. Plato’s Laws is the best known dialogues of his late period. Plato died in 347 B.C.

    More audiobooks from Plato

    Related to The Symposium (Librovox)

    Related audiobooks

    History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Universe in a Sentence: On Aphorisms

      Sep 18, 2019

      “An aphorism,” Friedrich Nietzsche aphoristically wrote, “is an audacity.” Exploring the pithiest of phrases, from Ben Franklin to Susan Sontag. The post The Universe in a Sentence: On Aphorisms appeared first on The Millions.

      11 min read

    • Article

      Plato

      Nov 3, 2022

      Plato
      6 min read

    • Article

      Taking Poetry Personally

      Nov 1, 2021

      To consider how absorption into a poem’s world works, immerse yourself in two opening stanzas. The first comes from John Crowe Ransom’s most anthologized poem, the elegy “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” first published in 1924: There was such s

      12 min read

    • Article

      The Lost Art of Not Knowing Something

      Feb 10, 2022

      I'd posit that there is a bit of Larry David in Socrates. They both puncture hypocrisy, force us to question our own moral platitudes, and deign that we must defend our presuppositions, even if doing so seems rude. The post The Lost Art of Not Knowin

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Larger Idea Of Love

      Mar 7, 2022

      The Larger Idea Of Love
      5 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Nov 21, 2021

      by Bryan Walpert Mākaro Press — $35 It needs to be made clear that this is a science fiction novel, specifically of the time travel variety. It takes place in three alternating narrative streams, one of which is told in reverse, so that the couple wh

      7 min read

    • Article

      Estate Management and Symposium

      Jun 2, 2023

      ISBN: 978-0198823513 Oxford University Press (2023) - £8.99 www.global.oup.com Anthony Verity's latest translation for Oxford University Press collects Xenophon's Estate Management, also known as Oeconomicus, and Symposium into a single volume, with

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Symposium

      Jun 15, 2021

      THE ANCIENT GREEK AND HELLENISTIC WORLD: ca. 700 BC – AD 100 Symposia varied significantly, from friendly gatherings to political events and venues of intrigue. They also became sites for self-positioning and self-identification. Depictions and retel

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Leiden Amun Papyrus

      Aug 22, 2022

      The Leiden Amun Papyrus
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Jordy Rosenberg

      Dec 10, 2018

      Sometime early in 2018, one morning of the long “bomb cyclone” in New York City—the kind of day where the dawn doesn’t break, but mizzles down through the wind and fog, pearling the air to a flat winter white for a few short hours until Night tips he

      6 min read

    • Article

      Binding The Ghost: On The Physicality Of Literature

      Jan 11, 2019

      The spirit is strong, but so is the flesh; books can never be separated from the circumstances of those bodies that house their souls. The post Binding the Ghost: On the Physicality of Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    • Article

      Ancient Greek Philosophers

      Nov 5, 2020

      Thales of Miletus is often considered to be the first philosopher and the father of Western philosophy, who founded the pre-Socratic Ionian school. At the time, the Greeks explained the origin of the world and natural events through myths and the sup

      3 min read

    • Article

      Poetry Is Prayer

      Feb 28, 2020

      Prayer and poetry are defined by being words that gesture beyond words themselves. The post Poetry Is Prayer appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      God Among the Letters: An Essay in Abecedarian

      Nov 30, 2018

      “When they ask what [God’s] name is, what shall I tell them?” —Exodus 3:13 “Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas.” —Dr. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) 1. Attar of Nishapur, the 12th-ce

      20 min read

    • Article

      Ode To The Library Museum

      Jul 24, 2018

      Ode To The Library Museum
      6 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      Aug 24, 2021

      By James M. Banner, Jr. ISBN: 978-0300238457 Yale University Press (2021) - $28.00 www.yalebooks.yale.edu Historians examine their subjects with respect to their political leanings, or themes such as colonialism, resistance, race, sexual orientation,

      5 min read

    • Article

      Life Versus Learning: A Battle Of The Titans

      Nov 30, 2023

      TWO VOLUMES SIT ON MY DESK: ONE, thick and weighty, features a marble bust of Plato on the cover. The other, slimmer, volume bears the image of Diogenes in his amphora surrounded by dogs. The contrast between the two contemporaries and rivals shines

      4 min read

    • Article

      Plato Goes To Syracuse

      Aug 4, 2023

      In the spring of 384 BC Plato was on his way home from Syracuse, the greatest Greek city in Sicily. He had left Athens the previous year for an extended visit to southern Italy and Sicily. Several ancient biographers tell us that at least one of his

      6 min read

    • Article

      Lake Of Souls

      Mar 20, 2024

      Lake Of Souls
      1 min read

    • Article

      Stories in Formaldehyde: The Strange Pleasures of Taxonomizing Plot

      Oct 2, 2020

      There is something to be said about the cool rectilinear logic that claims any story can be stripped down to its raw schematics and analyzed as fundamental, universal, eternal plots that have existed before Gilgamesh’s cuneiform was wedged into wet c

      16 min read

    • Article

      Hellenism in Rome

      Feb 29, 2024

      ‘‘TO A WISE MAN,” SAID THE FIRST-century wonderworker Apollonius of Tyana, “everywhere is Greece.” That is to say, Greece is not a mere place, but a special state of mind. For Apollonius, on his extensive travels around the Greco-Roman world, the pur

      3 min read

    • Article

      Hearing Voices and Talking Back: On Bibliomancy

      Mar 29, 2018

      I. Bibliomancy is a form of divination in which one consults a book for answers and advice. The process is simple: Stand the book up on its spine. Ask your question. Let the book fall open to a random page. With your eyes closed, place your finger on

      7 min read

    • Article

      How To Be: Lessons From The Early Greeks By Adam Nicolson Review – Ancient Wisdom For Today’s World

      Jul 18, 2023

      There was a wonderful, revelatory moment in Adam Nicolson’s last book, Life Between the Tides, where he suddenly telescoped out from the Scottish rock pool he was describing in order to meditate on the work of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus,

      3 min read

    • Article

      Rebel Greek Philosophers

      Mar 23, 2023

      Rebel Greek Philosophers
      6 min read

    • Article

      Ancient Wisdom, Modern Foolishness

      Sep 28, 2023

      THIS INTERESTING, SOMETIMES fascinating book is “about the first stirrings of philosophical thinking among the Iron Age Greeks”. But perhaps it’s less about those first stirrings than the last gasps of philosophical thinking in our age. It reminded m

      3 min read

    • Article

      Kanishk Tharoor on Writing Outside of Western Traditions

      Mar 16, 2017

      For years I knew Kanishk Tharoor primarily as the author of thoughtful essays about history, in the broadest sense: not just what happened in the past but also how humans have explored the past, made sense of the past, contested the past. So when I s

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Symposium (Librovox)

    4/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words