John M. Cooper > Quotes

“Accordingly, no book can actually embody the knowledge of anything
of philosophical importance; only a mind can do that, since only a
mind can have this capacity to interpret and reinterpret its own understandings.”
― John M. Cooper, Plato: Complete Works

“…his celebrated theory of ‘Forms’—eternal, nonphysical, quintessentially unitary entities, knowledge of which is attainable by abstract and theoretical thought, standing immutably in the nature of things as standards on which the physical world and the world of moral relationships among human beings are themselves grounded.”
― John M. Cooper, Plato: Complete Works

“Over most of the one thousand years of philosophy in ancient Greece and Rome, philosophy was assiduously studied in every generation by many ancient philosophers and their students as the best way to become good people and to live good human lives.”
― John M. Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus

“This is the study of the whole realm of Forms, working out in full detail all the relationships in which the various ones of them stand to one another. So the rise to full life, in our self-absorption into our intellectual origins and natures, is itself an exercise of philosophy, of philosophy at its essential core of active knowledge of Forms.”
― John M. Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus

“Engaging in Socratic question-and-answer dialectic is the key and indispensable means by which to sustain this commitment to care for one’s own soul.”
― John M. Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus