Where to start with Plato
The Apology puts Socrates on trial, showing why Plato's arguments work as scenes between people before they harden into doctrines.
The cave allegory and a summary of The Republic are most of the Plato you know; you want to hear the dialogues arguing in real time.
Opening with the Republic, hitting the cave allegory cold, and walking away with a slogan about shadows on a wall and no sense that Plato's whole project is a literary one — written dialogues, dramatic settings, characters who lose arguments and feel it. Treat the dialogues as treatises and the philosophy goes flat; treat them as theatre and the arguments come back to life.
Books in order
- The Apology — Read it as Plato's dramatic defence speech, not a verbatim court transcript or a treatise. Watch how Socrates refuses every easier version of the defence his friends would have written for him — the refusal is the philosophy, and the death sentence is what philosophy costs in this dialogue.
- The Symposium — Seven men at a drinking party, each giving a speech on love. Read it slowly; the speeches build, and Socrates's account of love as a striving born of lack only lands once the earlier speeches have been allowed their charm. Plato's clearest demonstration that ideas in his dialogues are inseparable from the people speaking them.
- The Republic — Ten books, one long argument about justice that quietly becomes an argument about the soul. Read the cave allegory in book seven only after you have lived through the ascent of the city-in-speech in books two through five — the allegory is a summary of an ascent, not a substitute for it.
Further reading
- Phaedo — The death of Socrates — the dialogue that closes the trial and execution sequence the Apology opened. Read it after the Apology and the Republic; the immortality argument is the philosophical content, but the dramatic frame, with Socrates calmly conversing as the hemlock takes effect, is the form that makes the argument earn its weight.
- Gorgias — Plato on rhetoric, justice, and whether it is better to suffer wrong than to do it. The toughest of the middle dialogues for the modern reader — Callicles is the most aggressive interlocutor in the corpus — and one of the cleanest demonstrations of Plato's method when the opposition is willing to fight back.
- Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle was Plato's student for twenty years and spent the rest of his life politely disagreeing. Read him after the Republic to see how the same project — what is a good life, and how is a polis arranged so that it is possible — looks when handed to a working scientist instead of a literary dramatist.
- Parmenides — Plato's hardest dialogue — the older Parmenides cross-examining the young Socrates and finding the theory of forms wanting. Save it for after the Republic; without the system in place, the cross-examination has nothing to push against, and the dialogue reads as obscurity rather than as Plato's own most rigorous self-criticism.
- Laws — Plato's longest and last dialogue — the Republic re-thought as practical legislation by an old man who no longer trusts the philosopher-king. Save it for after the Republic; the late revisions only register as revisions if you have lived inside the earlier vision.