I read Plato to argue online

Yellow lines recede into a starfield – Reading Plato, so I can understand Aristotle, so I can understand Kant, Hegel, Marx … so I can argue online. It is the honest reading list of every philosophy student – the great chain of Western thought, from the Academy to the comment section, where it is finally put to use.

That is Alfred North Whitehead’s famous line from Process and Reality (1929) – the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. He did not mean everyone agreed with Plato, but that Plato raised almost every question later philosophers worked on – knowledge, justice, the soul, the good, love and politics.

It helps a lot. Aristotle studied in Plato’s Academy for about twenty years, and much of his work is a running dialogue with his teacher – most famously his rejection of separately existing Forms. Reading a few dialogues first makes Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Ethics and Politics far easier to follow, which is exactly the chain the design jokes about.

A way of examining ideas through questions, named after Socrates as he appears in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates asks someone to define a concept such as courage or piety, then draws out consequences until the definition contradicts itself – a refutation called elenchus. The aim is not to win but to expose false certainty; the Euthyphro is a short, classic example.

A parable from Book VII of the Republic. Prisoners chained in a cave see only shadows on a wall and take them for reality. One is freed, climbs out, is dazzled by the sun and slowly sees the real world; when he returns to free the others, they mock him and would even kill him. It illustrates education as a painful turning of the soul from appearances to truth.

The view that behind changing, imperfect things there are unchanging, perfect Forms or Ideas – Beauty itself, Justice itself, the Equal itself – which we grasp with reason rather than the senses. Particular things are beautiful or just only by participating in these Forms. The theory appears in the Phaedo and the Republic and is already criticised in Plato’s own Parmenides.

Most teachers recommend the dialogues around Socrates’ trial and death – Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and the death scene of the Phaedo – which are short and vivid. Then go on to the Symposium on love and the Republic on justice. Plato wrote in dialogue form, so reading him is closer to overhearing an argument than to studying a textbook.

Hegel’s idea that concepts and history develop through internal contradiction – a position reveals its own one-sidedness, is negated, and both are preserved at a higher level (Aufhebung). The popular formula thesis, antithesis, synthesis is not Hegel’s; it was popularised by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, and Hegel himself mocked triadic schemas as lifeless. Marx later claimed to set the dialectic back on its feet.

He distrusted it. Plato distinguished dialectic, a shared search for truth, from eristic, arguing for victory, which he satirised in the Euthydemus. In Book VII of the Republic he warns that young people who first taste argument misuse it as a game, refuting everyone like puppies tearing at whatever comes near – a fair description of many comment threads.

Yes. It is a favourite of philosophy undergraduates, graduate students, teachers and anyone who has ever quoted the Republic in a reply. It is self-mocking rather than smug, which is why people who really did read all those books tend to like it most.

I read Plato to argue online comes as a unisex classic T-shirt, a sweatshirt, a premium hoodie, a mug and a sticker – the sticker fits neatly on the laptop where the arguing happens.