In this first part of a two-part series, Professor Daniel Silvermintz clarifies the real meaning of Platonic love by considering Socrates’ tireless pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. With this in mind, the lecture is interspersed with engaging dramatizations of the competing speeches about the meaning of love from Plato’s Symposium. Hung over from the previous night’s festivities, the participants in the symposium decide to replace their drinking activities with a rhetorical competition to see which speaker can offer the best praise of love. Even if Socrates ends up winning the competition, second place undoubtedly goes to the comic playwright Aristophanes and his romantic conception that love is reuniting with our primordial other half.
