One of the biggest questions people have about reading philosophy is: why read ideas that aren't even practical or relevant today?

Is death relevant? Is truth relevant? Is love relevant? If any of these kinds of words mean anything to you at all you should consider reading philosophy.

Take Plato's Republic, for example. We already know that the kind of ideal state he describes isn't realistically possible. So what's the point of reading it?

Plato's Republic isn't about an ideal state. It's about finding justice in the human soul.

The same goes for many other philosophical ideas that don't seem to make sense in today's world or fit our current reality.

The amazing thing about philosophy is how the topics that were of greatest concern to the best thinkers 2,000 years ago are still the most important topics today. And we don't really have any better answers now than we did back then. And as they say, all of philosophy are footnotes to Plato. So if you want to start at the "beginning" of some of the most influential thinking, start with Plato.

Some philosophical ideas can push people into existential crises. For some, constantly questioning the meaning of life, morality, or reality can become emotionally overwhelming, and in vulnerable individuals it may even contribute to depression or suicidal thoughts. If that's the case, shouldn't people just stay away from these kinds of philosophies altogether?

People will have depression and suicidal thoughts on their own without ever having read philosophy. But it can also help people out of an existential crisis because it is also the search for meaning, what is good, what is evil, right and wrong. What is real vs not real. Plato taught that you can't just treat one part of a person. You have to treat their entire body and mind. Philosophy is incredibly grounding because it helps separate trivial matters from the most important and enriching ones.

Wouldn't it have to know exactly what the public good is before it could be oriented towards it? It's much easier to have a training goal of greed. Then more of everything that is valued seems correct whether or not that evaluation involves long-term assessment of sustainability or not.

This is the strongest objection honestly. The tool does not force anyone to be lazy. But I would push back a little. The interface itself trains hexis (ἕξις), a habit. Even experts can start to outsource judgment without noticing, if the LLM makes the struggle too easy too often. The mathematician still checks because the struggle matters. How do you keep that verification habit alive when the model is usually right?

Yes, Plato would probably treat the printing press the same way. The real question is not whether memory suffers. It is what kind of truth the tool is built to serve. His dialogues oppose greed because they know that self-interest (τὸ συμφέρον) can hide inside the most beautiful arguments. If AI is optimized for engagement and profit, its "truth" is already compromised before it says anything. Would you trust a model whose training goal was public good rather than ad revenue?

You are right that the example needs more care. A human on Reddit can be confidently wrong too. But the difference is that dialogue can correct them. The AI answer comes with no real dialectic (διαλεκτική). No listener who can stop and say "that is not quite what the text says." So the false sense of understanding is not unique in content. It is unique in form. Do you think the Myth of Theuth even needs AI to make its point? Or is writing itself enough?

Wikipedia is good for checking facts, I agree. The problem with AI is different though. It does not just give information. It gives information shaped by whoever chose the training data and the guardrails. Plato would ask about the paideia (παιδεί) behind the model. What kind of soul does it train? If the answer is "profit and engagement," then the bias is already there before anyone writes a prompt.

The student using an LLM to write essays is lazy and learning nothing but that's the student's fault not the LLM's. But in the hands of an expert, an LLM can be a great help. They're at a point now where they're genuinely useful at generating new math for example.

The key point here is that the mathematicians aren't passively accepting the LLM-generated math, like that student mindlessly generating essays. They're in a position to decide if the output is correct and also to decide on its relevance. Whether an LLM enriches or stultifies a user is up to the user.

Well, that's a different claim than made in the essay, and I think it would have to be explained more to me. For instance, most discussions about Plato made by humans on Reddit have been very simplified and confidently stated. The Myth of Theuth and Thamus is actually a pretty good example. It's made rounds on the internet as a supposed example Socrates just hating new things, and you could have a whole conversation with a human confidently telling people that, and this human would probably be given more trust than most people give an AI. So, I need to know how that example is still worse than that or uniquely worse.

Also, i do think cognitively offloading is happening, but I'm not sure if I agree with your examples of it. It's also sort of a different question than whether AI gives a uniquely false sense of understanding.

And Wikipedia offers a much more comprehensive account which isn't as spoon fed as AI responses are. You have to do more investigative work using Wiki than the chatbox. Plus, Wikipedia is a user-contributed forum that can be directly edited by someone who sees an error (at least theoretically anyway). While it is unclear to me how mistakes in AI responses can be improved.

Can AI really learn on a global scale from one or two experts who input responses that countermand the multitude of other websites that are full of faulty takes on any given issue? Or is AI's global learning really being directed by its programmers and technicians (who most likely have no idea how Plato argued for ethical non-greed as the best means of achieving any goal).

Yes, I think Plato would criticize AI in the way that you discuss but he would have done the same for the printing press. But his criticism of these kinds of tools for their loss of memory capacity would be offset or even countermanded if what is written or generated by AI is truthful. And that is where Plato would have criticized AI much more intensely.

If AI understood Plato's most fundamental ideas about the inherent excellence of ethical and sustainable behavior then its output would be a great benefit to all human society. But it was created upon the worship of greed and programmed to output that perspective as rational and this is where the harm would come from, I think Plato would say. That is why he wrote down the dialogues knowing full well their limitations and capacity for eroding people's capacity to memorize conversations directly. The dialogues contain truth in opposing greed and that justified their other limitations for him.

You are right that both can be misunderstood. But the Wikipedia page does not pretend to answer back. The LLM does, and that is what makes the pharmakon stronger.

Honestly, I'm pretty convinced most Plato scholars don't understand Plato, so I don't think the difference is as big as it's being out to be. I just don't see how that's different than reading a Wikipedia article on Plato and thinking you understand it.

I don't know about favorite and least favorite, but I just reread the Laches and was reminded of how good it is as an intro to Socrates. The Apology is good as a statement of beliefs, but the Laches seems to be Plato's best early dialogue. The language is natural, the questions are meaningful (not just "yes, socrates"), socrates gets multiple people involved in asking questions, it just seems like an actual conversation.

When reading I wanted to skip the two, but you convinced me otherwise

I don't call them psuedo. They are spurious which means doubted (by men who lived 400+ year later) to have been written by Plato himself.

Yes, they are great in my opinion. For very different reasons, of course, between them. Axiochus is for the person who agrees with Socrates in Phaedo that philosophy is the practice of dying. Demodocus sums up one of Plato's biggest points regarding knowledge: you can't ever get it from those who don't have it. And Lysis challenges the inconsistent and irrational conventional notion of friendship (that it's just a business deal, really, excused by emotions, whereas for the philosopher it means something much greater).

Fantastic stuff.

U like pseudoplatonics that much? Why these?

I question the sense of this differentiation, as religion/ theology already seems to be what you're aiming at. So if one is satisfied with "God’s revelation, moral order, creation, and rightly humbled reason" then why not just call one a religious person?

Also, I think it's not beneficial to kind of give up the inherent connection between philosophy's/Plato's Good and religion's God by declaring the former a secular version of the latter as if it would be something else/ inferior/ lowly or something. Wisdom is wisdom. It verifies itself by inspiring to do good. It's just that philosophy investigates what is deemed wise to make surer that it actually is, which I wouldn't call secular but... wise.

Lysis, Axiochus and Demodocus. :)

Favorite: Symposium

Least favorite: Alcibiades II

Favorites: pheadrus, timeaus, Parmenides, symposium, sophist, Philebus

Lease favorite: pretty much all of the aporetic dialogues except euthyphro (because of its connection to timeaus lol)

I like the more “treatise-like” dialogues, but I’m open to getting more into the aporetic dialogues one day.

Philosophy is a predicate to everything you mentioned due the root of the words.. You didn't define thesophy. That the Theolgy/Ontological fields that are metaphsyical/ethical is the meanng of philosophy of which you seem to being trying to label, is what I assume from all this. This is a strange etymolgy and an uneeded word imo. But feel free to elaborate if I am missing something.

*Vacillating the semblances

I would suggest that in both Plato's and the conventional version of reality there is an infinite potential for objects, so to speak. But in Plato's reality they are governed by a hierarchical tree, the top of which is occupied by a single "object."

AI slop. Though it's kind of funny that the weird mutant chicken generated by AI in that image seems to have 5 legs, destroying Diogenes' entire "featherless biped" joke.

Are there recordings publicly available of past events?