I might have a tip for you, if you are new to Philosophy. This book is essencial to me, but I have a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy and I had to read it over and over for multiple purposes while studying different disciplines. Non -philosophers should probably mind that Plato can be repetitive in order to be absolutely clear and precise about every word (terminology). It's essential to 'catch ' the slightest difference in every meaning (even in words that feel like synonyms) and if you skip the 'boring' parts, you will miss important details. This book is not a novel and is not meant to be read like one. You are suppose to read the dialogues in parts, stop and think about the main idea, the method of asking precise questions, the common mistakes in understanding and find your own rights and wrongs before you can go on with the discussion. If you are ready to go there and take your time with Plato, you'll find out the beauty of his method.

Ok I only read 80% of this but....come on I had to skip some

4 stars for the subpar translations, 5 stars for Plato’s works.

Invaluable and comprehensive. One's mind will be changed for the better about such many things after reading this as death, wealth, morality, justice, love, plus plenty of other things. A deeper reading will influence one's perception of metaphysical and cosmological matters.

Well… quite the rollercoaster.

First things first, I haven’t actually read all the dialogues, just seemingly the most important/popular ones, which work out at 49.79% of the complete works, which I’ve read (skimmed some boring parts) in one year.
I don’t have a plan to complete it in the near future but hey, you never know.

What can I say about Socrates/Plato?
There seems to be a mist of doubt around the historical person of Socrates, since Plato wrote most of the dialogues a while after Socrates’ death, I’ll just assume this is mainly Plato’s work/thoughts.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socra...

You can see why Socrates/Plato are credited as founders of Western philosophy, it seems like any philosophy you discuss today is touched upon somewhere within the dialogues.

In terms of the philosophy, I was initially starry-eyed about Socratic dialogue.
After having watched the shit-flinging contests that are modern “debates”, one feels the need for more sustenance in more drawn out conversation where both sides agree to terms, hit a wall and attempt to break down the wall together.

Although Socratic dialogue is king, to me it is not the perfect format for conveying knowledge in a book.
Socratic dialogue lives and breathes, it cannot be immortalized on paper, to convince someone you either need to logically proceed from axiomatic premises, or talk to individuals to convince them.

The Greeks had a few axiomatic assumptions, like the existence of Greek gods and in my opinion the overvaluation of pure/speculative reason.

Which means many of the dialogues face-plant when you disagree with anything because you cannot follow the argument from there onwards.
Socrates’ dialectic partner believes in Zeus? Now you either cannot follow the argument or you have to be very aware of where you stand in the argument and what you’ve disagreed with.
If you disagree with a logical premise you cannot reach the conclusion.

Now that doesn’t mean that the dialogues aren’t fascinating and utterly thought-provoking.
If you want to investigate what philosophy has to offer, it’s nearly all in Plato.

But I don’t find it convincing. There’s *a lot* of fluff and meandering.

My last thoughts and impressions of Plato as I depart come from Nietzsche and Aristophanes:

“Courage in the face of reality is, in the final analysis, the point of difference between natures such as Thucydides and Plato. Plato is a coward in the face of reality—consequently he flees into the ideal; Thucydides has control over himself—consequently he also has control over things . . .”
- Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Chapter “What I owe to the Ancients”

“Well, he was doing some research on the movements and revolutions of the moon, gazing upwards, open-mouthed, and then this gecko shat on him from the ceiling in the dark”
- Aristophanes, The Clouds, Line 172

Quote above is a bit crude but illustrates the metaphysicians hard at work — being completely detached from reality — solving unimportant problems and splitting hairs.

LA vera Bibbia.

Based

Read it in college, as a philosophy (double) major with psychology--and this launched me down a ideological and theoretical quagmire, a maelstrom of questioning and then some. I fell in love with Plato's notion fo the "ideal." Imagine a fresh faced 18 year old, with little real life experience, wanting to believe that everything has an ideal version of the thing itself, so taken was I with this, I equated it with fact. Thank-god I came out of this phase, but reading this tome is an ambitious project. You may as well forget reading anything else for a while. It's dense and requires commitment. If you're inclined to philosophy and non-fiction, this is for you, though you'd also have to be partial to early Greek notions where it all began. It's very well structured, logically presented, and well-written, if a bit dry.

Terrible translations. Modern scholars have a bad habit of making classical writers speak in excessive colloquialism. This is no exception. The book literally opens with Euthyphro saying, "What's new, Socrates". They might as well have had him say, "Yo wuddup Socrat!"
Their logic is that it's appropriate because Plato's Greek must have been considered colloquial in his day. I disagree. It's an anachronism to apply modern colloquialisms to classical texts. Search for older translations.

Whitehead said in 1929 that all European philosophy "is but footnotes to Plato".

This is THE authoritative volume of Plato's collected works...marvelously translated by respected scholars. I had forgotten how downright funny many of Plato's dialogues actually are.

While I’m not much of a philosophy person myself; reading Plato’s first four dialogues was an interesting introduction to one of the most influential thinkers of all time. His use of Socrates as a character to display his dialogues with other historical characters brings to light how life was like in Athens during Plato’s time. I personally struggled to read through it for the first time but I slowly grasped what I was reading about. It’s decent I think.

I read the books offered on Plato that I could find at our local Goodwill store probably used student books but I didn't care I was using them for research for my own writing of paranormal romance novels. For me I found the quotes astounding thought provoking and would just get lost for hours then days reading off and on in the two books I purchased. I intend to use some of the quotes as chapter headings in my own stories. Simply amazing when you think of how long ago these were written and how lucky we are that writings survived for us to read today.