@bluff1,
bluff1 wrote:
I want to know what Greek ideas plato responds to? Why did he do this? Just general discussion on the topic.
e.g. In Symposium and Phaedrus, he uses the pederasty model (the homosexual reciprocal model) to help explain the dialectical process. He shows us that there are two ACTIVE lovers, instead of the traditional one active, one passive.
e.g. He also uses the familiar Greek image of the Charioteer and the horse as a way of explaining the soul. Why? Most likely because it was a familiar image which the Greeks could relate to and therefore understand more easily.
But are there any others??
I'm sure that this is far too general a response to be useful to you, but the answer to "What Greek ideas [does] Plato respond to?" is: all of them.
Prior to Socrates, the primary concern of philosophy was pursuing a form of primitive science, ie seeking non-supernatural explanations, or causes, for events. However, these endeavors generally involved the pursuit of an "ultimate concrete reality", or state, as a substitute for god-influenced, supernatural situations.
When Socrates came on the scene, he found the tools provided for him by previous thinkers an inadequate set of tools for pursuing "reality", but a well crafted set of tools for clarifying a persons' independent (ie, natural [v. super-naturally imposed]) thoughts and directing those thoughts toward the "ultimate, concrete" state of happiness.
Plato, as a devotee of Socrates' revolutionary, philosophical goal,
and as a student of a lot of prior Hellenic intellectual/cultural history, sought to syncretize those two divergent cultural strands: the "fact" and the "happy". He sought to link the "ideas" of both as coeval and to render them necessarily linked. And he succeeded...
You may have read this quote before:
"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato" [Alfred North Whitehead]
That's a pretty impressive statement, and it has the benefit of being correct. Prior to Plato's involvement in Western philosophy, "facts" and "feelings" were regarded as independent factors. It was Plato, despite himself, that first problematized both the difference and the relationship, ie the equation, between self and cosmos.
PS: On the other hand, while i've tried to answer the posted question seriously, if your post was a passive-aggressive homosexual slur, via your examples, you've failed utterly at making a point. Trollery that tries to be clever tends to do so by parading its ignorance.