Questions to Ask Plato
Plato never speaks in his own dialogues, so anything you ask him has to be answered from what his characters say. These 56 questions to ask Plato are for a student, a teacher or a curious reader planning a class discussion, an imagined interview or an essay, and they run in the order his thinking did: Socrates and the trial, the forms and the cave, justice, the city of the Republic, the soul and love, then the Academy and his own life. The note under each gives the passage a reply should rest on, where an invented answer tends to go wrong and where to press him.
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The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Socrates
How much of the Socrates in your dialogues is the real man, and how much is you?
Why ask it
Scholars call this the Socratic problem, and nobody has settled it. The usual working guess is that the short early dialogues stay closer to the man Plato knew and the later ones lend his voice to Plato's own theories, so in an essay name the dialogue before you write 'Socrates thought'.
What was Socrates like to be around?
Why ask it
The fullest portrait is the speech Alcibiades gives at the end of the Symposium: a man who walked barefoot over ice on campaign, once stood thinking on one spot from dawn until the next sunrise, and resembled the carved satyrs that open to show golden figures inside. Xenophon and the comic playwright Aristophanes drew him too, and the three portraits do not match, which is a fair thing to put to Plato.
What was he actually on trial for?
Why ask it
The charge was corrupting the young and not acknowledging the city's gods while bringing in new ones. Ask next why a jury was ready to believe it. The usual candidates are the young men who copied his style of questioning on their elders, and former companions such as Critias and Alcibiades who had done Athens real harm.
You were at his trial. What did the jury fail to hear?
Why ask it
The Apology names him among those in court and has him offer, with three friends, to stand surety for a fine of thirty minae. Keep an invented reply close to that speech, in which Socrates refuses to beg and tells the jury that what his questioning has earned from the city is free meals at public expense.
His friends had an escape arranged. Why did he stay and drink the hemlock?
Why ask it
In the Crito he argues that a man who has lived seventy years under the city's laws cannot break them on the day they go against him. Press the tension with the Apology, where the same man says he would disobey any order to stop philosophizing. A good essay tries to reconcile the two and admits what is left over.
Why were you not in the cell on the day he died?
Why ask it
The Phaedo lists who was present and adds one short line: Plato, I think, was ill. He names himself only three times in all the dialogues, and readers have long wondered whether this one is plain fact, an apology or a hint that the conversation which follows is his own reconstruction.
Did he really say that all he knew was that he knew nothing?
Why ask it
Not in those words. In the Apology he says he is wiser than another man by one small margin: he does not think he knows what he does not know. Hold on to the difference when you quote him. He is talking about not overrating yourself, and he never says knowledge is out of reach.
Is the unexamined life really not worth living, even for someone who is content?
Why ask it
Socrates says it to the jury after the guilty verdict, to explain why he could not accept exile and silence. The cheerful person who never asks why is the standing objection. Before anyone votes on the line, have the group say what examining a life would consist of and how often it has to be done.
Is something holy because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is holy?
Why ask it
Socrates puts this to Euthyphro outside the magistrate's office where he has come to answer the charge against him, and Euthyphro hurries away without solving it. Plato's other books point to his side: the good comes first and even a god looks to it, as the craftsman god of the Timaeus looks to a model when he makes the world.
Forms and cave
What is a form, in words a twelve-year-old could follow?
Why ask it
The classroom route is the circle: every circle ever drawn is slightly off, yet we know what a perfect one would be, and that perfect one is what the mind is after. One example is enough. The worrying answer calls the forms 'ideas in our heads', which is close to the opposite of what he meant.
Where are the forms, if they are not in this world?
Why ask it
It is a trap, and a fair one to set. The Phaedrus speaks of a place beyond the heavens, but inside a myth, and the rest of his writing suggests he would say 'where' is the wrong word for something outside space and time. See whether your imagined Plato corrects the question or walks into it.
Is there a form of everything, even mud and hair?
Why ask it
The young Socrates is asked exactly this in the Parmenides. He is sure about justice and beauty, unsure about human beings, fire and water, and thinks a form of hair, mud or dirt would be absurd, at which point Parmenides tells him he is still young. Quote it whenever someone says Plato never saw the awkward cases.
How can anyone know a form without ever having seen one?
Why ask it
His answer is recollection. In the Meno, Socrates leads an untaught slave boy to a result in geometry by asking questions only, and takes it as a sign the soul knew before birth. Have someone point out that the questions are leading ones, which they plainly are, and see how much of the theory is left standing.
What separates knowing something from holding a correct opinion about it?
Why ask it
The Meno compares true opinions to statues so lifelike they run away unless tied down, and the tether is working out why the thing is so. Then the Theaetetus spends a whole dialogue trying to define knowledge and ends without a definition. If your Plato sounds sure of himself here, he is surer than the man who wrote both books.
What is the Good, and why did you never define it?
Why ask it
Asked directly in the Republic, Socrates declines and offers the sun as a likeness: what the sun is to sight, the Good is to knowing. A later report describes Plato lecturing on the Good to an audience that came for advice about wealth and health and got mathematics. Any neat one-line definition you write for him goes further than he ever did.
What is the cave story really about?
Why ask it
Socrates introduces it as a picture of our nature with education and without it, and afterward says that teaching is not putting sight into blind eyes but turning the whole soul to face the right way. Students often take it for a story about being lied to. Ask what in it resembles a school, and whether anyone in the story is doing the job of a teacher.
In the cave, who are the prisoners supposed to be?
Why ask it
When Glaucon calls them strange, Socrates replies that they are like us. Students tend to cast somebody else as the chained one, so before discussing anyone else's shadows have each person name one of their own: something they took on trust and have never turned around to check.
Who are the people carrying the objects behind the wall?
Why ask it
The allegory mentions them once and never explains them, which is why this makes a good essay question. Poets, politicians and the paid teachers called sophists are the common candidates, the makers of what a city believes. Whoever you choose, notice that the carriers are inside the cave too.
Why does the freed prisoner go back down?
Why ask it
In the Republic the philosophers are required to return and take a turn at ruling, because the city raised them and is owed. The allegory is frank about the cost: he stumbles in the dark, gets laughed at, and the prisoners would kill a man who tried to free them if they could lay hands on him. Every reader hears Socrates in that last line.
If the cave were built today, what would be on the wall?
Why ask it
Screens are the first answer in every classroom, and that is fair as far as it goes. Push further: the shadows are not lies, they are real effects of real objects taken for the whole truth. So look for something accurate but partial, such as a ranking, a headline or one side's clip of an argument.
Your own Parmenides takes the forms apart. Why write the strongest objections yourself?
Why ask it
The best known is the regress later nicknamed the Third Man: if large things are large by sharing in a form of largeness, the form and the things together seem to need a further form, and so on without end. Readers disagree on whether he dropped the theory, repaired it or was drilling students. An essay can defend any of the three if it says which.
Justice
The Republic takes ten books to say what justice is. What is the short version?
Why ask it
Each part doing its own work: rulers, soldiers and producers in a city, and reason, spirit and appetite in a person. Notice that this defines an inner order and says little about how you treat anyone else. Ask whether it still answers the question the book opened with.
Is justice simply telling the truth and giving back what you owe?
Why ask it
It is the first definition tried in the Republic, drawn from the old man Cephalus, and Socrates sinks it with a single case: a friend lends you a weapon, goes out of his mind and asks for it back. Nothing in the book shows his method faster, a rule tested on an example until it breaks. Have the class repair the definition, then break the repair.
Thrasymachus said justice is whatever suits the stronger. Did you ever really beat him?
Why ask it
He goes quiet at the end of Book One, and at the start of Book Two Glaucon says he gave up too easily and restates the case in a stronger form. The reply takes nine more books. A quick dismissal in your imagined interview is the sign of a writer who stopped reading at Book One.
Would the shepherd who found the ring of Gyges have any reason left to be just?
Why ask it
Glaucon tells the story to argue that people are just only because they are watched: the shepherd turns invisible, kills the king and takes the kingdom. Plato's reply is that injustice disorders the soul, so the wrongdoer loses even if nobody ever finds out. Try it on something small, like copying an answer no one will check.
Is it truly better to be wronged than to do wrong?
Why ask it
Socrates defends exactly that in the Gorgias, against a young man who finds it ridiculous, and adds that the wrongdoer who escapes punishment is the worst off of all. Ask the room who agrees, then who would still agree an hour after being cheated. The distance between those two shows of hands is the subject of the dialogue.
What does a tyrant's life look like from the inside?
Why ask it
Book Nine answers anyone who thinks injustice pays: the tyrant is ruled by his own cravings, surrounded by flatterers, afraid to travel and unable to trust a single friend. Test it against a powerful wrongdoer the group can name. The hard part is how anybody on the outside would know whether such a person is miserable.
The city
Why should philosophers rule, when they are the ones who least want to?
Why ask it
The reluctance is the argument. The Republic says a city is best governed where the rulers would sooner be doing something else, since people who want power fight each other for it. The place to press is who selects the philosophers, and who removes one who turns out to be wrong.
You called it a noble lie. What makes a lie told by rulers noble?
Why ask it
The story tells citizens they were born from the earth with gold, silver, or iron and bronze in their souls, so that each accepts a rank, and Socrates is visibly reluctant to bring it up. Give one side the case that every country runs on founding stories and the other the case that a truth-loving ruler who lies has broken his own argument.
You loved Homer. Why would your city turn the poets away?
Why ask it
Book Ten says poetry copies appearances and feeds the part of us that enjoys grief and anger, and Socrates admits he has revered Homer since he was a boy. The irony to raise is that the case is made by one of the most gifted storytellers in Greek. Then ask what he would restrict now, and whether you would vote with him.
What did you have against democracy?
Why ask it
His picture is a ship whose crew fight over the helm and ignore the one person who can navigate, and in Book Eight unlimited freedom ends by handing the city to a tyrant. Keep two facts beside it: a democratic jury condemned his teacher, and the rule of the Thirty, which included his own relatives, was worse.
Why did you let women rule in your city, when Athens gave them no say in politics?
Why ask it
In Book Five he argues that sex has no more to do with fitness to rule than being bald or long-haired has to do with making shoes, so the women of the guardian class get the same training and the same work as the men. He also says women are on the whole weaker, so do not turn him into a modern campaigner. Ask what in the argument forced the conclusion on him, since nothing in Athenian custom did.
Would you want to live in the city you designed?
Why ask it
Its guardians own nothing, have no household of their own and never learn which children are theirs. The Republic itself closes the subject by calling the city a pattern laid up in heaven for someone who wants to found it in himself. A thoughtful answer reads it as a model of a soul, and a worrying one reads it as a program and skips the price.
You went to Syracuse to teach a young ruler philosophy. What went wrong?
Why ask it
Letters handed down under his name, whose authorship is disputed, describe three journeys to Sicily and an attempt to educate Dionysius II that ended with Plato all but detained and his friend Dion in exile. It is the one field test of the philosopher king, and the pupil did not want the lessons. Bring it up whenever the Republic is treated as only theory.
In your last book the laws rule and no philosopher king appears. Did you change your mind?
Why ask it
The Laws is his longest work, Socrates is not in it, and it describes its own city as second best. Whether that is a retreat after Sicily or a practical companion to the Republic is a real essay question. If your Plato says the two books agree, make him explain the words 'second best'.
Socrates died on a charge of impiety, and your Laws would punish people who deny the gods. How do you square that?
Why ask it
Book Ten of the Laws sets out penalties for impiety that run from prison to death for those who will not be persuaded. It is one of the hardest things to ask him, so ask it plainly. In an imagined interview, do not let him slide past the comparison with the trial, because the comparison is the whole question.
Soul and love
Why does the soul have three parts and not two?
Why ask it
His evidence is inner conflict. A thirsty person who refuses a drink shows reason against appetite, and a man furious with his own eyes for wanting to stare at corpses shows a third part, spirit, taking reason's side. The Phaedrus turns it into a charioteer with two horses. Ask which horse won the last time someone broke a promise to themselves.
What makes you so sure the soul outlives the body?
Why ask it
The Phaedo offers several arguments on the day Socrates dies, and two friends raise objections strong enough to silence the room for a while. Socrates in the end calls the belief a risk worth running. Write him the way that book does, arguing, stalling and starting again.
The Republic ends with souls choosing their next lives. Did you mean that literally?
Why ask it
In the myth of Er the first soul to choose grabs the life of a tyrant, and we are told he had been decent in his last life out of habit and not understanding. Plato labels his myths as stories and never says how much he would swear to. The safer reading is the moral: good habits that were never examined fail when the choice is free.
What did Socrates mean when he called philosophy practice for dying?
Why ask it
The reasoning in the Phaedo is that death separates soul from body, and a philosopher spends a lifetime caring less about what the body wants. It can sound grim to a class. A useful follow-up is whether the author of the Symposium, a dinner party full of jokes and hiccups, wrote like a man who had given the body up.
What do people get wrong when they call a friendship platonic?
Why ask it
The modern word means affection with no romance in it, which is narrower than anything in his books. In the Symposium love begins with attraction to one beautiful person and is meant to climb from there to character, to knowledge and finally to beauty itself. He starts from desire and asks it to keep climbing, and that is the part the modern word leaves out.
Is falling in love a kind of madness?
Why ask it
Yes, and in the Phaedrus that is praise. Socrates first argues against the lover, then takes it all back and says the greatest goods come to us through madness when it is a gift of the gods, counting four kinds: prophecy, healing rites, poetry and love. The follow-up is who ought to be steering, since the same dialogue gives the soul a charioteer.
Was Diotima a real person?
Why ask it
Socrates credits his whole account of love to a woman from Mantinea named Diotima, and no source apart from the Symposium mentions her. Real or invented, Plato chose to have a woman teach Socrates the central lesson of the dialogue, and why he did is worth ten minutes. In an essay write 'Diotima, as Socrates reports her'.
Do you believe lovers are two halves of one person?
Why ask it
That speech is given to Aristophanes, the comic playwright: humans were once double, Zeus cut them in two, and each half goes looking for the other. Diotima rejects it later the same evening, saying love is of what is good and not of a missing half. It is the handiest proof that a line in a dialogue is not always Plato's view.
His life
Is Plato even your real name?
Why ask it
Diogenes Laertius, writing more than five hundred years after his death, reports that he was named Aristocles and that Plato, roughly 'broad', was a nickname from his wrestling teacher. Many scholars doubt the story, since Plato was an ordinary Athenian name. It makes a light opener and an early lesson in how late the anecdotes are.
Your family expected you to go into politics. Why did you stay out?
Why ask it
He was well born on both sides, and relatives of his, Critias and Charmides, belonged to the brutal regime of the Thirty. The Seventh Letter, which may or may not be his, says he watched that government and then watched the restored democracy execute Socrates. Build the answer on those two shocks and it will hold together.
What happened at the Academy on an ordinary day?
Why ask it
Less is known than students assume. It began around 387 BC in a grove outside the city walls, mathematicians such as Eudoxus worked there, and a comic poet of the time made fun of its pupils solemnly classifying a pumpkin. Put more conversation and geometry than lecturing into any scene you set there.
Was 'let no one ignorant of geometry enter' really written over the door?
Why ask it
The inscription is reported only by writers many centuries later, so treat it as tradition. It does fit the Republic, where future rulers spend ten years on mathematics before they are trusted with philosophy proper. The follow-up worth asking is why he thought working with numbers was training for questions about right and wrong.
After a lifetime of teaching, do you think goodness can be taught?
Why ask it
The Meno opens on this exact question and ends without settling it, after Socrates points out that admired fathers such as Pericles could not pass their qualities on to their sons. A quick yes from a man who ran a school is the worrying answer. The dialogues suggest he would first ask you what goodness is.
Aristotle studied with you for twenty years and then rejected the forms. How did you take it?
Why ask it
Only Aristotle's side survives: in his Ethics he writes that friends and truth are both dear and truth has to come first. Plato's reaction is unrecorded, so whatever you write is invention and should be labeled as such. The likeliest guess is that a teacher who put objections to himself in the Parmenides counted a pupil who argued back as a success.
Why do you never speak in your own voice?
Why ask it
He is not a speaker in any of his dialogues, so no claim arrives with his signature on it and the reader has to weigh the argument and not the authority. For an essay that means writing 'Socrates argues in the Republic'. For an imagined interview it means a Plato who answers a question with a question is in character.
In the Phaedrus you say writing weakens memory and cannot answer back. Why write so much, then?
Why ask it
Socrates tells of an Egyptian king who is offered the invention of writing and warns that it will give people the look of wisdom without the thing. A written page, he adds, says the same words however you question it. The dialogue form may be Plato's way around his own objection, and the complaint is easy to try on a phone.
Did Atlantis exist, or did you make it up?
Why ask it
The story first appears in his Timaeus and Critias, presented as a tale Solon brought back from Egyptian priests, and no earlier source for it is known. The Critias breaks off in the middle of a sentence. Most scholars read it as an invented account of a proud sea power beaten by a small, well-run Athens, so do not let your Plato give sailing directions.
Which of your dialogues should a beginner read first?
Why ask it
He left no reading order. Teachers usually start with the Apology, which is short and carries no theory, then the Euthyphro or the Crito, and the cave before the whole Republic. Whichever one your Plato chooses shows what you take his center to be: the death of Socrates, the forms or the city.
A modern philosopher called all of European philosophy a series of footnotes to you. Is that a compliment?
Why ask it
The line is Alfred North Whitehead's, from 1929, and he was praising the wealth of ideas scattered through the dialogues, not their conclusions. Others were harsher: in 1945 Karl Popper called the Republic a design for a closed society. A man who wrote dialogues that end in disagreement might well prefer the second kind of reader.
Which question did you never manage to answer?
Why ask it
There are honest candidates: what the Good is, how a thing shares in a form, what knowledge is. Several dialogues end in what the Greeks called aporia, an admitted dead end. Ask it last, because the question you leave him stuck on becomes the thesis of your interview or essay.
How to hold an imagined hour with Plato
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Before you put words in his mouth
He wrote characters, not statements
Every view in the dialogues is spoken by someone else, most often Socrates. In an essay, credit the speaker and the book: 'Socrates argues in the Republic'. In an imagined interview, decide at the start whether your Plato owns what his Socrates says, and keep to that decision.
Decide which Plato you are talking to
Scholars sort the dialogues into rough periods, and the order is their reconstruction, not his. The early ones (Apology, Euthyphro, Crito) are short and end without an answer. The middle ones (Phaedo, Symposium, Republic) bring in the forms and the immortal soul. The later ones (Parmenides, Theaetetus, Laws) have second thoughts. A question about the forms gets a different reply from each.
Treat the life stories as late
Most anecdotes about him come from writers who lived centuries afterward, and the letters under his name are of doubtful authorship. Use 'is said to' for the wrestling, the burned tragedies and the sign over the door, and save the plain statements for what is in the dialogues.
Four words that mislead
A form is not a thought in someone's head: it is what a thing really is, whether or not anyone thinks of it. Justice translates a Greek word closer to being as a person should be, in every respect. Soul means whatever makes a body alive and able to think, with no church attached. Platonic, in the modern sense, is not his word at all.
Using the list in a class or a group
Read the passage first
The famous images are short. The cave takes about four pages at the start of Book Seven of the Republic, the ring story two pages in Book Two, and the ladder of love a few pages near the end of the Symposium. Read one aloud and then ask the questions about it, so the group is discussing the text and not a half-remembered summary.
Match the group to what has been read
The tags run in the order of his thinking: Socrates, the forms and the cave, justice, the city, the soul and love, his life. A class that has read only the Apology has enough for the Socrates group. One that has the cave passage can take the five cave questions and the one on the Good. A group that has read nothing can begin with His life and with the cave built today.
Test a definition until it breaks
Most of the short dialogues run this way. One person offers a definition of courage, friendship or justice, the others look for a case it gets wrong, and the definition is patched and tried again. Book One of the Republic does it three times in a row. Ten minutes of it teaches the method better than any description, and it is fine to end stuck, as those dialogues do.
Cast the parts
The dialogues are scripts. Give one reader Socrates and another Glaucon, Thrasymachus or Meno, and read a page aloud before anyone discusses it. Then keep the casting: whoever read Thrasymachus argues his side on justice, and someone else takes Aristotle's part against the forms. Plato wrote his opponents real arguments, and a session with nobody pushing back turns into a recital.
Writing the interview or the essay
Let him answer with a question
The most recognizable move in the dialogues is 'what do you mean by that word?' A Plato who asks the interviewer to define courage before he will say whether soldiers have it sounds right. A Plato who delivers five tidy paragraphs sounds like an encyclopedia entry.
Give him an image, then let him distrust it
He explains his hardest ideas with pictures: a cave, the sun, a ship, a chariot, a ladder. He also keeps warning that a likeness is not the thing. Have him reach for a comparison and then add where it stops working, and the voice will be close.
Give him someone to talk to
Nobody in the dialogues answers questions put by no one. Decide who the interviewer is: a Glaucon who agrees too quickly, a Meno who wants the answer without the work, a Thrasymachus who thinks the whole business is naive. The same question about justice becomes a different conversation with each. Whoever it is can tell him things, too. He died around 347 BC, so Rome's empire, Christianity and what Aristotle went on to become are all news to him.
For an essay, pick a tension
Choose a question whose note shows two things pulling apart: the Crito against the Apology, the poet who bans poets, the theory attacked by its own author. Argue one side and cite passages by the numbers printed in the margin of every edition, such as Republic 514a for the opening of the cave, so a reader with a different translation can find them.
Where imagined Platos go wrong
Plato with the jokes taken out
The dialogues are funnier and sharper than their reputation. Socrates teases, flatters people he is about to take apart and gets compared to an electric ray for leaving them numb. A Plato with no irony in him is a statue.
The man with every answer
Many dialogues end with everyone admitting they are stuck, and the central books stop short of defining the Good. Leave some answers unfinished. 'I tried that, and here is where it failed' is more faithful than a conclusion.
The hero and the villain
Two opposite cartoons are on offer: the champion of equality built from Book Five, and the dictator built from the philosopher kings. Keep the awkward facts from both sides in view, including the censorship, the noble lie and the women who rule.
Lines he never wrote
Many sayings credited to him online are not in his works. 'Only the dead have seen the end of war' is a common one and appears in none of his dialogues. Before quoting him, find the dialogue and the passage number. If no one can give you either, leave the line out.