Sunday, 30 August 2026

Major works meeting

• Continuing Metamorphoses
• Starting from 1.243
• Ending around 2.400
• Next week we’ll finish Book II and start Book III of Metamorphoses

Minor works meeting

• Starting Statesman
• Beginning around 257a
• Ending around 264c
• Next week we’ll continue Statesman

Statesman reminder for next week:

[Spence] After concluding the discussion with the visitor in Sophist Socrates is happy and invites the visitor to continue the discussion so they may complete what they set out to achieve, which was to find the Statesman and the Philosopher. However, they decide they need to swap out the youth, and they choose a young Socrates who is not related other than by the having the same name—which is something, as old Socrates says. They proceed to look for the Statesman by separating kingly power from the parts that implement some kind of practical action, instead choosing for the sake argument to focus on the part that performs correct judgement. Not only is it correct judgement but the kind of judgement pertaining to the management of people. However it is not the kind where they oversee their individual tasks to completion; it is another kind. We have not yet discerned exactly this kind because there was a digression on the nature of dividing things in general. That digression focused on how one may fall prey to the temptation to divide things just because they are easy to be divided, while not realizing that the divisions are not useful. An example of this was separating humans from animals, as this division was not unlike a common mistake people of the day made, which was to separate the world of humans into Greeks and Barbarians.