How to read Plato (1995)
&gt; Make the assumption that Plato was a smart guy (A. N. Whitehead once wrote that all western philosophy is but a set of footnotes on Plato&#x27;s dialogues...) and, if you find some place where there is a dumb way of reading the text and a smart one, assume Plato had the smart one in mind, even if Aristotle tried to make us believe he had the dumb one, ...<p>This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him in the most favorable way possible... (And the second rule btw is that Plato is better than Aristotle—which incidentally also makes up most of the first rule.)<p>I&#x27;ve read some plato and been very impressed with what he was doing <i>at his time</i>. That said, I&#x27;ve run into a number of folks who insist that he is <i>still</i> one of the most important philosophers to read (in the sense of being capable of benefitting modern readers)—but I can never get them to say what any particular idea(s) he has that&#x27;s useful or true&#x2F;important but not already well known. And any ideas I came across in my own reading were either easily demonstrable to be incorrect (and which someone as intelligent as Plato never would have espoused if he lived with our modern knowledge), or I&#x27;d already run into them in other contexts.