Episode 95: Platonic Aesthetics

Michial Farmer moderates a conversation with David Grubbs and Nathan Gilmour about Plato's writings on poetry, painting, music, and other kinds of art. Stepping beyond the standard "Plato hates poets" treatment, the trio starts with a conversation about the state of literary, visual, and musical arts in Athens, then enters into a handful of dialogues in which Socrates and his interlocutors make a complex array of assertions about the places of music and poetry and such in the good life. Among the dialogues and other realities discussed are tragedy, comedy, Republic, Phaedrus, Charmides, Symposium, and allegory.