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1 results

  • 3 - Plato’s Critique of the Homeric Education

  • Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Davidson College, North Carolina
  • Book:
    Homer and the Tradition of Political Philosophy
    Published online:
    18 August 2022
    Print publication:
    25 August 2022, pp 132-193

  • Summary

    Plato criticizes Homer’s effort to promote religious skepticism through his portrayal of the gods for overestimating the power of human reason and underestimating the power of human passions, and he criticizes Homer’s education concerning human excellence for inadvertently glamorizing the passionate and tragic hero Achilles and all too effectively hiding his own example as a philosophic thinker behind the mask of the divinely inspired singer. Plato therefore replaces the Homeric education with a new, poetic, Platonic education that presents Socrates – the fearless, dispassionate, self-sufficient, apolitical philosopher who promulgates the pious, edifying, and reassuring doctrines of the separate Forms and the Immortality of the Soul – as an explicit object of admiration and model for imitation.