Spring 2023

 

Plato in Prospect Park

 

 What is real? What is true? How can we know?

What is just? What is right? How should we live? 

 

These are among the most fundamental questions any human could ask. The answers that we give to them will shape the most basic and significant parts of our lives, including our political decisions and what we think each new generation needs to learn before it begins to lead. But as important as these questions are, they are not the sort that are raised and discussed in math or science classes. Nor are they likely to taken up in any detail in a history or literature class. They are questions of philosophy, and that they are not discussed in our schools says something about the nature of our own society.  And it means that we need to ask these questions for ourselves.

So on April 22 in Prospect Park, that is what we are going to do. We will base our discussion by considering how these questions were framed 2400 years ago by the philosopher Plato. In his book The Republic, which was about the importance of justice and what is necessary for a person and a society to achieve it, he tells a fable of people who have spent their entire lives chained up in a cave, watching shadows on a wall and mistaking them for reality. This is the human condition, Plato thought, and we need to escape from the cave if we have any hope of learning what is true and good. In other words, we need to become philosophers.

Click here for a link to a copy of the fable.

So please join us. Admission is free, but the discussion will be rich!

 

For: Grades 9-12

When: Saturday, April 22 12-2 pm 

Where: The Picnic House North, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn