Classical Philosophy Reading Group

This is the fourth in a series of discussions for people wanting to get to grips with Classical Philosophy – the foundation of Western philosophy. The Ancient philosophers, as taught at British universities, are now too regularly the focus of politicised revision. They are considered elitist and a colonialist imposition, a cypher for hostility to Greece and Rome as the founding narrative of much despised Western civilisation.

Since we started this series, Bridget Phillipson, the Secretary of State for Education, has seen fit to cancel the Latin Excellence Programme for state secondary schools. The mess this has made of Classics and Latin teaching is near catastrophic. This is explained in detail by Holmes-Henderson, Arlene, Steven Hunt and Alex Imrie in their article for Languages, Society and Policy - 'Ancient Languages in UK Schools: Current Realities and Future Possibilities'. It makes for dire reading.

This series of discussions aims to reinvigorate an interest in Classical Philosophy by looking at the enduring themes and ideals of Western civilisation, from freedom to democracy, which emerged in Ancient Greece and Rome. Surely, an understanding of Classical Philosophy has never been more presicent. This course – open to all, consisting of about five online discussions / seminars over 2025 – will act as an introductory guide to tackling the ideas of Socrates and Plato.

In the first three discussions we have seen Socrates face his detractors and defend himself against accusations of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. He failed in his defence and we witnessed him meet his end with remarkable composure in the Phaedo.

But Plato is by no means done with Socrates. In the Phaedo, Plato introduces us two major themes in his writing - the immortality of the soul and the theory of the Forms. The Forms allow Plato to separate out the world of ideas in the mind and the soul from the bodily and faulty world of our senses in which some would say we really live. This a challenge which philosophy has struggled to resolve since Plato's day. Whether Plato actually remained an adherent of his own theory is contested, but the theory of the Forms remains a powerful idea throughout his writing.

In the Meno, Plato begins to address the question of how we learn new ideas? His theory of recollection suggests that the immortality of the soul gives us a way of seeing that the soul already has knowedge of the Forms. This knowledge is lost at our birth. Education is then about relearning what we - the soul - already knew.

In the Theaetetus, we meet Socrates in pursuit of knowledge again with a young philosopher. This dialogue pushes us to examine the limits of rational thought in another remarkable dialogue. Plato pushes his theory of epistemology even further in this dialogue. This is actually the first substantial written work to look at the theory of knowledge in the history of human thought.