In this second part of a two-part series, Professor Daniel Silvermintz continues his discussion of Plato’s Symposium. Interspersed with dramatizations of each speaker, Professor Silvermintz provides clear and engaging explanations of the various arguments culminating with a detailed discussion of Diotima’s ladder of love. Following the other speakers’ more conventional accounts of love, Socrates redirects the entire discussion from praises of physical desire to the intellectual contemplation of beauty itself. Socrates not only wins the Symposium’s rhetorical competition, his appeal to a transcendent realm of forms sparks an intellectual revolution that will inspire fellow seekers for the next twenty-four hundred years to join him in pursuit of absolute truth, goodness, and beauty.
