PLATO (The Philosopher): USER's GUIDE
PLATO (the philosopher): USER’S GUIDE (version of December 6, 2016, emended April 6, 2020) “Unless either the philosophers become kings in the cities or those who are nowadays called kings and rulers get to philosophizing truly and adequately, and this falls together upon the same person, political power and philosophy, while the many natures of those who are driven toward the one apart from the other are forcibly set aside, there will be no cessation of evils, my dear Glaucon, for cities, nor, methinks, for the human race.” Plato, République, V, 473c11-d61 “I realised that it is not only the material world that is different from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we think ourselves to be directly perceiving and that we compose by means of ideas which don’t show up but are active, in the same way the trees, the sun and the sky would not be such as we see them if they were appre- hended by beings having eyes differently constituted from ours, or else en- dowed for this task with organs other than eyes which would provide equiva- lents of trees and sky and sun, though not visual.” M. Proust, The Guermantes Way, translation C. K. Scott Moncrieff revised by me (Note: a table of contents based on bookmarks is available for display on the left part of the screen in Adobe Reader) Foreword: this paper is a translation by me into English of a paper I originally wrote in French, my native tongue, under the title “Platon: mode d’emploi” (version of December 6, 2016).
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