What Diotima Taught Socrates

The Five things that Diotima taught Socrates were (1) Not everything is of one thing or the opposite. (2) Love is in need of Good and Beauty therefore not Good or Beautiful but it is not moral or immortal but is a spirit. (3) Spirits are intermediaries between the gods and humans.  They bring the gods prayers and sacrifices from the humans and in return spirits bring gifts back to the humans.
(4) Where the spirit Love comes from and what gods Love was born from. (5) The spirit Love is a love of wisdom because, she is the daughter of Resource who was wise and resourceful and Poverty which has neither, of the mix of her parents she knows of wisdom but has not obtained it.

The one thing about Diotima that interests me about what she said was when she talks about the spirits bringing gifts from the gods because love is a gift from god and it is interesting to me that she believed that love brings a gift and is not in itself a gift.

Symposium by Plato

ASIGNMENT

1. Know how each speaker defines love

2. figure out how each speech improves on previous

3. What do all of the speeches have in common

4. How Diotimis Speech is different

• Phaedrus asserts that both gods and humans regard Love as great  and awesome, for many reasons. In particular, Love is widely considered older than almost all the other gods, and has no parents.

•  Pausanias points out that there are two kinds of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. First, there is Heavenly Aphrodite, the daughter of Uranus, with whom he associates "Heavenly Love." Second, there is Common Aphrodite, daughter of Zeus and Dione, who is considerably younger than Heavenly Aphrodite, and with whom he associates "Common Love." 
• Love is neither good nor bad but what makes it is how

• Eryximachus adds to Pausanias' points on two kinds of loves but adds that not just humans but plants and animals. Not only medicine, but also athletics, agriculture, and music are all wholly governed by the god of Love. Eryximachus concludes that Love is ever-present and all-powerful in our lives, as it is the cause of all self-control, happiness, and justice, and it produces good actions.
•  Aristophanes' speech comes in the form of a myth.  And this explains why we try to find affection
• Agathon's speech is about the nature of the god.
• Socrates goes to tell what he perceives as the truth and proves Agathon wrong.
•   Diotima's speech is different from the rest because he uses the socratic method on socrates