Jonty Claypole

speaker

11,327 appearances 34 recordings 3 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 3d ago

Jonty Claypole’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 34 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 6.

Appearances

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Secret Life of Books · Greek Lessons by Han Kang · 11 Aug 2026 podcast

And Plato, his student, really takes that to heart, and Plato's books. voice-verified

Are these dialogues in which Socrates is the is the star act? voice-verified

So The Republic is the most influential book by Plato, and arguably the most influential work of philosophy in Western thought. voice-verified

And it has many dimensions to it. voice-verified

At the heart of it is a series of conversations between Socrates and his chums, who all have names like Glaucon, about what an ideal state might be. voice-verified

Look like, how it would operate. voice-verified

And that's why it's called the Republic. voice-verified

They're shaping the idea of a state which would be stable, as you were saying earlier, Sophie, that that would be safe and would be the ideal state for the discovery of truth and the advancement of humanity. voice-verified

Now, famously, Socrates's utopia or the utopia developed by he and his friends is not the sort of world. voice-verified

Anyone would want to live in. voice-verified

It's a totalitarian regime. voice-verified

Poets and artists are bad. voice-verified

They have nothing but contempt for poetry and artists because they claim that all poets and artists are doing is sort of imitating things which are in themselves imitations of the truth. voice-verified

So as it goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that no one would actually want to live in this utopia. voice-verified

And it's often framed as a criticism of Plato and Socrates, but I think Plato. voice-verified

Plato knows this and is doing it deliberately. voice-verified

But one of the core images that emerges in the Republic is the metaphor of the cave. voice-verified

And that is what is referred to in Greek lessons at various points. voice-verified

Socrates says: our relationship to the truth is one where we are essentially blind. voice-verified

We never really get to see it. voice-verified

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