Despite his ceaseless efforts to purge his fellow citizens of their unfounded opinions and to bring them to care for what he believes to be the most important things, Plato's Socrates rarely succeeds in his pedagogical project with the characters he encounters. This is in striking contrast to the historical Socrates, who spawned the careers of Plato, Xenophon, and other authors of Socratic dialogues. Through an examination of Socratic pedagogy under its most propitious conditions, focusing on a narrow class of dialogues featuring Lysis and Alcibiades, this book answers the question: "why does Plato portray his divinely appointed gadfly as such a dramatic failure?"

This book develops for the readers Plato’s Socrates’ non-formalized “philosophical practice” of learning-through-questioning in the company of others. In doing so, the writer confronts Plato’s Socrates, in the words of John Dewey, as the “dramatic, restless, cooperatively inquiring philosopher" of the dialogues, whose view of education and learning is unique: (1) It is focused on actively pursuing a form of philosophical understanding irreducible to truth of a propositional nature, which defies “transfer” from practitioner to pupil; (2) It embraces the perennial “on-the-wayness” of education and learning in that to interrogate the virtues, or the “good life,” through the practice of the dialectic, is to continually renew the quest for a deeper understanding of things by returning to, reevaluating and modifying the questions originally posed regarding the “good life.” Indeed Socratic philosophy is a life of questioning those aspects of existence that are most question-worthy; and (3) It accepts that learning is a process guided and structured by dialectic inquiry, and is already immanent within and possible only because of the unfolding of the process itself, i.e., learning is not a goal that somehow stands outside the dialectic as its end product, which indicates erroneously that the method or practice is disposable. For learning occurs only through continued, sustained communal dialogue.

Bridging the gap between interpretations of "Third Way" Platonic scholarship and "phenomenological-ontological" scholarship, this book argues for a unique ontological-hermeneutic interpretation of Plato and Plato’s Socrates. Reconceptualizing Plato’s Socrates at the Limit of Education offers a re-reading of Plato and Plato’s Socrates in terms of interpreting the practice of education as care for the soul through the conceptual lenses of phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics, and ontological inquiry. Magrini contrasts his re-reading with the views of Plato and Plato’s Socrates that dominate contemporary education, which, for the most part, emerge through the rigid and reductive categorization of Plato as both a "realist" and "idealist" in philosophical foundations texts (teacher education programs). This view also presents what he terms the questionable "Socrates-as-teacher" model, which grounds such contemporary educational movements as the Paideia Project, which claims to incorporate, through a "scripted-curriculum" with "Socratic lesson plans," the so-called "Socratic Method" into the Common Core State Standards Curriculum as a "technical" skill that can be taught and learned as part of the students’ "critical thinking" skills. After a careful reading incorporating what might be termed a "Third Way" of reading Plato and Plato’s Socrates, following scholars from the Continental tradition, Magrini concludes that a so-called "Socratic education" would be nearly impossible to achieve and enact in the current educational milieu of standardization or neo-Taylorism (Social Efficiency). However, despite this, he argues in the affirmative that there is much educators can and must learn from this "non-doctrinal" re-reading and re-characterization of Plato and Plato’s Socrates.

Despite his ceaseless efforts to purge his fellow citizens of their unfounded opinions and to bring them to care for what he believes to be the most important things, Plato's Socrates rarely succeeds in his pedagogical project with the characters he encounters. This is in striking contrast to the historical Socrates, who spawned the careers of Plato, Xenophon, and other authors of Socratic dialogues. Through an examination of Socratic pedagogy under its most propitious conditions, focusing on a narrow class of dialogues featuring Lysis and Alcibiades, this book answers the question: "why does Plato portray his divinely appointed gadfly as such a dramatic failure?"

This book will help you to understand Badiou's central concepts, the philosophical relation between Badiou and Plato and will rethink the importance of Badiou's 'Platonic' claim that 'the only education is an education by truths'.

The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato's Cave, was presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a) to compare "the effect of education (παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter. The allegory is presented after the analogy of the sun (508b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d–511e). All three are characterized in relation to dialectic at the end of Books VII and VIII (531d–534e). Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality.

In this unique and important book, William Altman shines a light on the pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his ability to create living discourses that directly address the student. Reviving an ancient concern with reconstructing the order in which Plato intended his dialogues to be taught as opposed to determining the order in which he wrote them, Altman breaks with traditional methods by reading Plato’s dialogues as a multiplex but coherent curriculum in which the Allegory of the Cave occupies the central place. His reading of Plato's Republic challenges the true philosopher to choose the life of justice exemplified by Socrates and Cicero by going back down into the Cave of political life for the sake of the greater Good.