Glenn Rawson

In spite of his reputations as an impractical skeptic or dogmatic idealist, Plato’s Socrates is often an impressive example of a critical thinker, and we can use Plato’s dialogues to promote such skills in the college classroom. This essay summarizes recent institutional motivations for promoting critical thinking in a student-centered, active-learning pedagogy; compares Plato’s core model of education and fundamental rationale for it; shares an essay–presentation–discussion assignment that serves those modern and ancient goals; and discusses how this flexible type of assignment is especially well suited for Plato’s dialogues, serving students and teachers in a Socratic manner. The first two sections thus situate Plato’s dialogues in relation to the heart of critical thinking in higher education generally. The later sections and Appendix explain a way to “follow the arguments” with Socrates that’s informed both by recent best practices and by much of what we see in Plato’s dialogues.

It is widely recognized that according to Plato the supreme object of knowledge and the supreme object of desire are the same: "the good." But the reason for this belief, and the roles of desire in Platonic education, are not adequately understood. My study of relatively neglected topics, such as Platonic inquiry $,$ intellectual "lacking" or "wanting" $,$ and knowledge of "the good" as a kind of self-knowledge, bring new light to the well-worn themes of Meno's Paradox, Socratic method and Platonic love. ;Each of the various models of education in Plato's middle period incorporates everything that is essential to the Socratic method of elenchus in his earlier dialogues. Each of these models maintains that the desire-component of any inquiry specifies beliefs about the object of inquiry that must be true if the inquiry admits of success; each model also maintains that true beliefs can become understanding $$ under conditions of Socratic scrutiny, which always seeks the explanation of the beliefs that define the inquiry. Throughout early and middle dialogues, Plato hopes that an allegedly universal desire of the good will make ethical understanding possible by enabling the identification of true beliefs about "the good." According to Plato, all genuine understanding must begin with the desire to learn, and all genuine understanding includes a kind of self-knowledge, which is the result of understanding one's own desires. ;These essential elements of Socratic and Platonic education promise partial resolutions of well-known epistemological difficulties in early and middle dialogues. They describe the conditions under which the Socratic elenchus of early dialogues can achieve positive results, rather than merely test for consistency among an individual's beliefs. They are part of Plato's complete response to Meno's Paradox, and describe the necessary conditions of success both in the geometry lesson, and in the inquiry about the nature of virtue. They are also a neglected element of the philosopher's "dialectical method" in Republic, and they help to explain why dialectic alone, according to Plato, can achieve understanding of "the good."

While visiting original sites provides a clear benefit to study in ancient history, art, and archaeology, this benefit of such an activity for philosophy is less conclusive. In addition to describing a series of classes on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle that used seven sites in Greece in a study abroad program, this paper draws on student surveys to argue that on-site sessions have two kinds of benefits. First, visiting sites can enhance understanding by providing important contextual information that greater illustrates certain philosophical points. Second, visual aids available at on-site sessions also bring the reading of texts to life and increase a student's motivation to understand the material.

: Plato's founding position in the tradition of epistemological nativism has been underestimated. In addition to his notorious, naively non-dispositional model of learning as recollection, Plato offers several neglected dispositional models of innate ideas, including Diotima's model of mental pregnancy in the Symposium, in which maturing mental embryos begin not with the actual content of the knowledge to be acquired, but with a specific potentiality that must be actualized through series of specific kinds of experience and mental activity. A survey of dialogues from Meno to Phaedrus shows that Plato typically favors such dispositional models, and that he raises doubts about the non-dispositional details of the recollection model where it occurs