Abstract

‘Paideia’ connotes the handing down and preservation of tradition and culture, even civilization, through education. Plato’s education of philosophers in the Academy is inimical to such an essentially conservative notion. His dialectical method is inherently dynamic and open-ended: not only are such conclusions as are reached in the dialogues subject to further criticism, so are the assumptions on which those conclusions are based. In these and other ways explored in this paper, Plato demonstrates that paideia has no harbor within philosophy.