Welcome to Reason and Persuasion: Thinking
Through Three Dialogues by Plato, or maybe
it should be Reason and Persuasion: THINKING
Through Three Dialogues by Plato, we'll talk
about it later. My name is John Holbo. I'm
an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the
National University of Singapore, and I'll
be your lecturer for this course. As you know,
this is a eight week Coursera course. As you
may know, the first six weeks of the course
will be devoted to three dialogues by the
ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and the written
material which will correspond to that teaching
material is found in my book, Reason and Persuasion:
Three Dialogues by Plato. The paper version
will be available on Amazon by the time this
course begins. The free electronic version,
it's a free downloadable PDF, is currently
available and will remain so, so you're free
to take your pick of the free e-option or
the paper option when that becomes available.
This is an introductory course. That means
it's suitable for beginners in philosophy.
Like all good introductions, it's also distinctive
in its way, and that means that some non-beginners
should still find some other material suitable
to interest them. How is the course distinctive?
Well, that may take us to the final two weeks
of the course when we leave Plato behind,
jump forward 2000 years in time and consider
some contemporary issues and problems and
arguments which, in some sense, correspond
to the issues, problems and arguments we will
have already encountered in Plato. And the
moral of the story will be there that the
more things change, the more they stay the
same, that is, Plato is very relevant.  I hope
to prove that to you. What should you get
out of this course? Well, since I've assured
you that Plato is very relevant, you'll get
lots of things out of this course. Approximately,
you should get everything out of this course.
Why do I say that? Well, one of the cliches
about Plato is that all of Western thinking
or all of Western philosophy is just footnotes
to Plato. That sounds like such outrageous
praise that people probably don't really think
about it, but I will argue that, to a surprising
degree, it is true. He's astonishingly influential,
but everything is fantastically useless as
advice as to what you might seek to get out.
Plato is a crossroads. For 2000 years people
have been meeting here and taking things from
this spot and bringing things and leaving
here and making their way in surprisingly
different directions, and that is Plato's
legacy. He's this platform for people to meet,
and I hope to present that to you. I'll point
my way down a few of those roads, and hopefully,
some of them will look interesting to you.
But like any meeting at a crossroads, any
decision, it's, it's up to you where you'll
take it, and since that is the case, I think
I will conclude this introductory video with
a philosophical question. One of the cliches
about philosophy, and it's a cliche about
Plato, too, is that there's lots of questions
and not a lot of answers or rather there's too
many answers, every question has different
answers, and we never really get a final resolution
to any of these deep questions we'll be asking,
and I think that that's true. You won't be
surprised to hear me say it, but what I'd
like you to think about is why would that
be valuable? Why would it be valuable to ask someone a question and have them give you many
answers but not one answer? I think that question
is sufficiently difficult that it should hold
you until this course begins. Thank you very
much for listening.
