柏拉图的认识论在当时确实令人印象深刻，令人惊叹。60多年前，当我第一次读到这个洞穴的寓言和随之而来的文字解释时，它让我目眩神迷，就像(有一段时间)吃了药一样。就像所有的毒品一样，它褪去了，但它仍然是一个美好的记忆。但他的话并不是最后的结论。
His literary style, however, and wit, which received wisdom assigns not to him but to Socrates, has never faded in my experience, and pieces like Protagoras and Euthyphro and Phaedo grow only more entertaining, moving, and powerful wtih each reading.
But his political philosophy, I believe, is absolutely pernicious and not deserving of respect. If implemented, his Republic would look like Afghanistan under the Taliban. I cannot off hand give you the reference, but Aristotle called the Republic unfit for human beings.
Now, having given full disclosure, I want to come to the wisdom of Plato. Your guest, and you guys, too, failed even to mention the extravagant and ridiculous invention Plato had to make in order to ground, as it were, his "bizarre"(as one of you called it) theory of knowledge: the soul, an immaterial something that has neither location nor dimension. Plato seems to me to me to have expropriated Euclid's geometric point, and assigned one of them to each of us. With the possible exception of the neutrino, there is nothing like it in the real world that we inhabit, and even the neutrino falls far short, for it interacts, barely, with the real world as far as any of us, including Plato, understands it, yet he blithely ignores the contradiction: we are not geometric abstactions nor do we carry them within us. Non-interaction with the material world seem to me as good a definition of non existence as we're going to get. Somehow Plato got away with that slight of hand, rather like Citizen Kane's famous last word, "Rosebud," which no one could have heard because the old fellow died alone, yet the search for the meaning of "Rosebud", as Kane understood it, informs the entire film that follwed, only to produce only a cliche unworthy of even a cocktail party: we really love what we most loved in childhood (along with some good stuff along the way, even so.)
柏拉图对几何学的滥用不仅使他否定了诗歌(除了他喜欢的诗歌，比如品达花钱买的布道书，否定了运动员的歌曲，必须承认，运动员可能需要这些歌曲)，而且使他允许哲学家国王说谎。我甚至读过一些史德斯坦学派(Staussites)的书，他们借用了一点古老的智慧来为乔治·w·布什(G. W. Bush)在公共场合的恶行开脱。但请给施特劳斯派一个评价:他们一眼就能认出哲学家国王。
然而，最糟糕的是，柏拉图认为我们不可能既知道什么是对的/正义的/好的，同时又做什么是愚蠢的/邪恶的/坏的想法，这一想法既诱人又荒谬，真的让他陷入了困境。然而，他一定知道菲德拉在这个问题上的巨大挣扎，以及她在欧里庇得斯的《希波吕忒斯》第一集(176-524行)中可怕而可悲的失败，以及她在这一集的中途对特罗伊森的女人的演讲(373 - 430行)。如果你读一下前后的合唱颂歌，就能更好地理解这一集。读一读，你就会明白我的意思，它既适用于相关的古人，也适用于当时的大众戏剧观众。
古代有这样一个故事:欧里庇德斯把他的戏剧交给苏格拉底进行批评分析，然后才投入生产。这段话给这个故事增加了一些可信度，尽管希波吕托斯可能太早了一点(公元前428-27年)，不可能被我们从色诺芬和柏拉图那里知道的苏格拉底预先试镜。无论如何，它被广泛地知道和讨论，可能苏格拉底和柏拉图都知道，亚里士多德引用了它;它是现存最早的所谓苏格拉底悖论的表述，尽管它的表述比柏拉图后来通过苏格拉底的形象所表达的要少一些，而且要宽容得多。
关于你今天节目讨论的一个更大的问题，是否一些希腊人提出的问题——希腊人很多，他们相信很多不同的东西——在我看来，他们没有开发出能够给出好的答案的方法，甚至没有给出比当时公认的答案更好的答案，尽管他们破坏了一些不好的答案。希波克拉底作家与苏格拉底、柏拉图和他们的追随者同时代，也可以这样说。希波克拉底把神从医学中去除，但并没有真正带来任何伟大的进步，就像我们过去两个世纪的特征一样:绝育，麻醉，抗生素，公共卫生，等等，等等，这些在一定程度上依赖于更好的实验方法，以及对所谓的还原论的强烈偏好——知道何时以及如何干预疾病的发展——当然，还有更惊人的技术进步。
I agree that we have much to learn from the Greek experience in many areas of life, from both their successes and even more from their failures, but most of all from coming to understand how unlike us they were and yet how dependent our own is existence is on their .surviving legacy. They challenged the gods. We, as we slowly acquire god-like powers, quake and tremble. As Sir John Beazley put it, "They were young. We are old. In our decrepitude, they mock us." They challenged the gods. We, as we slowly acquire god-like powers of destruction and creation, quake and tremble.

希腊的民主历史始于退休法官德拉科(Draco)让雅典人变得高尚。他成功地记录和编纂了法律，但他的惩罚是如此荒谬地严厉，这些法律仍然被称为“严酷的”或“严酷的”。"
The Athenians next turned to a merchant, Solon, who wrote poems to virtue but softened the law. Even so, Solon's greatest achievement was to established a centrally-planned and centrally-controlled economy which allowing a great deal of personal and economic freedom. His insight and pragmatism was to bring prosperity to Athens as it evolved democracy until the time of Plato. Then came the deluge.
柏拉图在通往进步的道路上是一个灾难性的人物(这是哲学家马克斯·奥托(Max Otto)和作家阿瑟·凯斯特勒(Arthur Koestler)的说法)。古典学者c·m·鲍拉写道:“(柏拉图)准备为永恒和安全牺牲几乎一切，最后很明显，让他感动的是恐惧。正因为如此，他才如此不信任人性及其野心和欲望，不信任任何一种个人或政治自由，不信任多样性和变化，不信任整个生活的丰富多彩...."
The ancient Greeks were ingenious, energetic and insightful but limited by their time and knowledge. As long as we remember this, not only philosophers, but we all can still benefit much from studying their struggle to understand and master the workings of the world.

I found Arvo's comments lucid and insightful. His(?) last sentence was most instructive. How old do we wish to go? The Chinese appear to pre-date almost everyone else, and a recent finding seems to show they wrote things down---long before the first Greek was ever born. Ancient wisdom? Indeed. The bigger question might be:
到底有多古老才算古老呢?嗯。

所以，如果可以的话，请告诉我，古老的智慧是如何有益的。我已经活了半个多世纪了，但我还是不明白。现代似乎有自己的方式来消除或重新定义古老的智慧。似乎“情境”决定了行为以及这些行为是如何被感知的。作为一个成长于五六十年代的孩子，我的世界没有形成任何绝对的东西。在我认识的一些年轻父母中，我确实看到了一些复兴。古老的智慧始于家庭。

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