So can I pick this up and read it with very limited knowledge

>>9600642
Yes.

>>9600642
Read the 5 dialogues first, its much shorter and gives you a way to ease into platonic dialogues and it also provides context of who SOKRATZ was.

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>>9600680
>the 5 dialogues
What? Which 5?

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>>9600739

>>9600756
DAT file name tho..

>>9600756
Meno shouldn't be there. It should be the four dialogues. Meno belongs in conjunction with Protagoras

>>9600642
Very simple yes

>>9600642
You most certainly can. Whether that would be fruitful for you might depend on how willing you are to wrestle with the text. Republic tends to get people butthurt about all sorts of things like little else in philosophy.

>>9600642
Yes

Relative to most philosophy books, hell yes.

Still doesn't hurt to read some greek literature and philosophy before The Republic.

Why of all things Plato wrote, is this proto-Utopian nonsense the most popular?

>>9600756
Just buy A Plato Reader from Hackett which contains those five plus, Symposium, Phaedrus and The Republic.

>>9602028
t. Hackett Ltd. marketing employee

>>9602001
Republic had the allegory of the cave. Thats all anyone cares about.

>>9602001
This >>9602101 and because it contains many (by no means all) of Plato's central ideas, giving new readers a decent idea of much of his thought, and touching on basically every arena of philosophy; and it's high-flown, idealistic, and entertaining enough to be preferred to the later "Laws," which although pretty similar is not quite as exciting overall and is read by almost nobody.

>>9602101
Not nearly as cool as Socrates' hollow earth theory.

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>>9600756
>mfw he doesn't know his understanding of plato is spoonfed to him by jewgle imago
>mfw he doesn't know those five dialogues are the most bluepilled of platos works
>mfw he will wonder what went wrong when his wife leaves him to join isis and remember my post

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>>9602669
>mfw he hasn't memorized Cratylus and all the etymologies

>>9600756
You could just read the Phaedo, it's a good introduction on its own. The others in the five dialogues have subtler arguments and would probably not be as interesting for a beginner.

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>>9600642

It's constantly recommended as an entry point for philosophy but I honestly think no, unless you're familiar with the basis of Plato's thought and the pre Socratics or at the very least familiar with greek society and culture eneough so you can contextualize his quest for the ideal "polis" I think you will get very little out of it most people I have seen who started with the republic didn't get it at all and come away with the impression of it being just antiquated nonsense.

No. Start with Hiroclitus (very short read) and the Pre-Socratics.Early Greek Philosophy on Penguin is a good comp.

And after that there's >>9600680 this too

>>9603213
>No.
Plato is self-contained. If you need to know something to follow the argument, he'll tell you. Him and Aristotle are our source for most of the pre-Socratics anyway.

>Start with Hiroclitus (very short read)
The flux doctrine Plato ascribes to Heraclitus probably wasn't even what he actually believed. Even people in Heraclitus' time complained about him being cryptic, and they weren't trying to piece his thought together from fragments.