Beauty, Love, and Knowledge in Plato’s Symposium

In his debut Salon, Michael Spicher will explore the ideas of love, knowledge, and especially beauty in Plato’s Symposium.

Plato’s Symposium is widely regarded as a wonderful work of literature and philosophy. In this dialogue, a handful of people get together and challenge each other to give spontaneous speeches about love. They each go and the final speech is given by Socrates as he recounts a conversation he had with Diotima about beauty, love, and knowledge. While I recommend reading the whole dialogue, the main focus of this salon will be on Socrates’s speech and ideas. But we will draw from personal experiences and other philosophers and ideas to move the conversation along and provide insight into the connection between these three broad concepts. We will try to focus on how thinking about the relationship between these concepts provides practical value for our lives, and not only fodder for the intellectually curious.

This salon is for those interested in beauty.

Here are some questions we’ll address:

• What is beauty? And how does it benefit our lives?
• What is the relation between beauty and love?
• What is the relation between beauty and knowledge?

Strongly recommended that everyone read Plato’s Symposium, at least Socrates’s speech.

This is the translation that I will be using.