I just finished this. What should I do next?

fap

>>9547601
Read Laws

>>9547601
You should tell us about it, what knowledge did you gain from it?

Republic is only like 5% of all of Plato's works....

crito and apology (warning: he doesnt apologize)

symposium

theaetetus, protagoras

laws and parmenides

>>9547615
Justice can be thought more of a state of being rather than a description of actions. The society we live in will greatly influence what we consider our virtues to be, and thus we should be wary of "artistic" influence above philosophical quests for truth. Those who are unjust in our society but appear to benefit are actually morally sick and suffer the greatest of us all.

I'm not sure I agree with his crucial assumption that every human should only specialize in a single task in an ideal society though.

Timaeus

>>9547601
Go straight to Mein Kampf. Then read Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies. Then you will finally understand why Plato's political philosophy is utter totalitarian shit which made Hitler possible.

>>9548366
wtf I love Plato now

>>9547601
Depends on whether and how you'd like to build off of the Republic. The dialogues are all partial in themselves and to some extent require and benefit from comparison with other dialogues to fill in gaps.

For example, if you'd like to follow up the inquiry into Justice with rhetoric concerning Justice, Gorgias could be your next reading. If you'd like to see another dimension to Eros (Eros being downplayed in favor of Spiritedness in the Republic), then check out the Symposium. If you'd like to take more seriously the problem of nature and custom/law, then look at the Laws. If you'd like to see the Good as understood as the source of Being, check out Parmenides. If you'd like to see the Good as understood as that which is the aim of human lives, check out the Philebus. If you'd like to see what happens if the scale of the Republic is expanded beyond the city-soul analogy to a cosmos-soul analogy, check out Timaeus-Critias.

And so on. Try and let your concerns guide you.

>>9547610

This is the only correct answer. Laws and the Republic need to be read together.

Laws, then Aristotle's Politics

>>9549393
>>9549396
Do I have to read any other Plato to understand Laws? And then once I have those two, is that enough to read Aristotle's Politics?

>>9549471

Not really, Laws is essentially Plato revising and refining his thought from the Republic.

>>9549471
Not really, no. It helps some to be familiar with the Republic or the Statesman, but those two dialogues and the Laws are all doing different things and set out from different circumstances.

The Republic is honestly good enough on its own for being able to fruitfully move on to Aristotle's Politics, since he comments directly and substantially on the Republic.

>>9549479
Thanks. And what's a good translation for Plato/in general? I've heard to avoid Penguin. I'd like annotations.

>>9549494
One could argue endlessly about Plato translations, unfortunately. But if you're thinking about the Laws, the Thomas Pangle translation is the one to go for.

>>9549510
How much do translations matter for a pleb like me? If I'm just a philosophy casual who wants to be able to read future philosophers, will certain translations hurt me at all? I don't have the expertise to judge what a good or bad one even is. This goes for any philosophy not written in English.

>>9549532
Depends; everyone shits on Jowett, but he's usually alright, but some translations (Cornford's translation of the Republic) are just garbage that change significant elements that make a mess of the whole thing. Others are usually alright except that they cut out the interlocutors under some mistaken idea that they're "yes-men" (I forget if it's Reeve or someone else, but some significant translation of the Republic does that), though to be honest I don't think most casuals would wonder why that's important to the philosophy itself, which is a tough point to summarize, and as per your concern, it doesn't stand in the way of grasping other philosophers. The Cooper edited Complete works is pretty alright; not the best translations by any means, but totally serviceable.

But avoid anything that insists that it's not important to translate key words consistently. An example from Cornford's Republic (this example is used by Allan Bloom in the preface to his own translation, but it stands out as the perfect example of something egregious):

"...his character is not thoroughly sound, for lack of the only safeguard that can preserve it throughout life, a thoughtful and cultivated mind," where the last clause is literally "argument/reason mixed with music" in the Greek. That kind of translation doesn't help at all.

>>9549564
I read Jowett's translation, but the endnotes were written by someone else who explained when the translation was a bit more subtle than it seemed. I hope that was alright to get the right ideas. Honestly the text is dense enough for me to feel like I don't remember all the details anyway, and mostly the overall flow of the arguments.

I'm not sure how to really read philosophy in general but I've been just doing in casually in this way.

>>9549584
That's probably fine; at worst you can always return to Plato later. Truth be told, it took about seven years for me to see just how crazy everything really gets in the Republic, which isn't something one can pick up on or appreciate in a first reading, which to be fair is partly also a point made in the Republic itself.

>>9549599
>it took about seven years for me to see just how crazy everything really gets in the Republic
What do you mean by this?

>nobody recommending Gorgias

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>>9548366
>open societies

>>9549532
Reading Kant in German is masochistic. So when you arrive there, dont worry about the original

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>>9550402
Someone actually wasted their time typing this out.

>>9550766
>Someone actually wasted their time typing this out.

>>9550787
> > Someone actually wasted their time typing this out

>>9547601
Become a philosopher king

>>9550216
The Republic, as a fairly large work, has a lot of details that will go unnoticed on not just first, but second and third readings (and likely more) as well. And those details aren't just minor modifications of the argument, but are either worked through in unnoticed ways (The Thrasymachean principles of precision and indignation, which are worked through as, respectively, the principle about arts in the city, and subsequently philosophy, and the role of spiritedness in the soul and the guardians and auxiliaries) or are deeply undermining to the argument (like the "longer way" towards understanding the soul that Socrates brings up several times, or how Glaucon's insistence that the city of pigs have luxuries, which gives us what Socrates implies is the city in falsehood for the rest of the book).

The overall thesis changes in light of the details, and it changes pretty dramatically and confusingly. But those details are hard to pickup and work on early readings. And it helps to have read other dialogues to see how they point to gaps in arguments.

>>9547601

read it again

>>9547601
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations

>>9550357
When Popper says Open Society, he basically means the opposite of Soros (the ultimate Platonic monster)