Life and works
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| c. 428/427 BC ≈ | Born in Athens to an aristocratic family (the SEP gives '429?'; recent scholarship cited in the SEP's Socrates chronology proposes 424/423 BC).[3] [2] [1] |
| 399 BC | Death of Socrates, to whose circle Plato belonged; after the execution he leaves Athens and spends a period in Megara, followed by travels the tradition attributes to him (Cyrene, Italy, Egypt).[2] |
| c. 387 BC ≈ | First journey to Italy and Sicily; in Syracuse he attaches himself to Dion, brother-in-law of the tyrant Dionysius I.[2] |
| c. 387–380 BC ≈ | Back in Athens, founds the Academy, the school Britannica places in the 380s BC and describes as a remote ancestor of the modern university.[2] [3] |
| before c. 387 BC ≈ | Dialogues of the so-called early (Socratic) period, on the usual stylometric chronology: Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, Laches, Charmides, Gorgias, Protagoras, among others.[2] [1] |
| c. 380–360 BC ≈ | Dialogues of the middle period, including the Phaedo, the Symposium and the Republic (books II–X), in which the theory of Forms is articulated.[2] [1] |
| c. 367 and 361 BC ≈ | Second and third journeys to Syracuse, involving him with Dion in the attempt to influence the young tyrant Dionysius II — episodes narrated in the Seventh Letter, whose authenticity is disputed.[2] |
| late period ≈ | Late dialogues, among them the Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus, Philebus and the Laws; the corpus transmitted under his name also includes letters and works of disputed authenticity.[2] [1] |
| 348/347 BC | Dies in Athens at about eighty; according to Diogenes Laertius he was buried at the Academy.[3] [2] |
How he read him
Reception, not philosophy: each entry records how Olavo de Carvalho characterised this philosopher, attributed and dated to the 2002 course. The project does not adjudicate who is right. The recordings are machine-transcribed and unchecked against audio, so everything here is paraphrase and nothing is quoted.
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He says outright that he is not a great admirer of Plato, and calls the philosopher-king a monumental error: beyond knowing the universal law a ruler needs authority, and he asks how Plato failed to notice he had none — where Moses and Muhammad had it and were obeyed for millennia.
Curso História Essencial da Filosofia, session 02 — the Socratic project — 2002 ?
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He reads the Sicilian debacle as a caricature of Socrates' fate: Plato tries to steer a coup in a neighbouring state, it fails, the conspirators are killed or imprisoned and Plato is sold as a slave and bought back by a student. Socrates, on his reading, is the philosopher who knows he cannot be king.
Curso História Essencial da Filosofia, session 03 — Socrates and Plato — 2002 ?
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On the three worlds: the world of forms is not a superior world above the one man inhabits — it is that world. Man stands wholly in neither temporality nor the sensible, which is why the Plato-Aristotle dispute over whether the forms exist in themselves cannot be settled: on his reading neither the forms nor the sensible world exist in themselves, only within eternity.
Curso História Essencial da Filosofia, session 03 — Socrates and Plato — 2002 ?
Reception in the COF
Present in 315 of the 589 transcription files of the Curso Online de Filosofia; 114 lectures engage him substantially (5 or more mentions). The most engaged lectures:
This section documents what Olavo said and when — never what the philosopher "really" meant. Characterizations are Olavo’s, tied to a lecture by number and date.
| Lecture (aula) | Date | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| 324 | — | 46 |
| 144 | — | 33 |
| 146 | 2012-03-17 | 31 |
| 72 | 2010-08-29 | 28 |
| 103 | 2011-04-23 | 28 |
| 211 | 2013-07-13 | 26 |
| 325 | — | 24 |
| 97 | 2011-03-12 | 23 |
| 151 | 2012-04-21 | 22 |
| null | — | 20 |
| 74 | 2010-09-11 | 20 |
| 243 | 2014-03-22 | 20 |
| 2 | 2009-03-21 | 19 |
| 43 | 2010-01-30 | 19 |
| 58 | 2010-05-15 | 19 |
A dash in the date column means the transcription file carries no verified date — an undated file, not an undated lecture. Counts are accent-insensitive, word-boundary matches over the public community transcription corpus.[4] [5]
References
- Plato — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Plato (427—347 B.C.E.) — Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Plato — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- COF — community transcriptions of the Curso Online de Filosofia (585 lectures) — Community transcription repository (upstream declares CC0 for the transcription work; the lectures remain the estate's)
- COF em Áudio — lecture audio collection — Internet Archive (community upload)