How to read Plato (1995)

This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him in the most favorable way possible... (And the second rule btw is that Plato is better than Aristotle—which incidentally also makes up most of the first rule.)

I've read some plato and been very impressed with what he was doing at his time. That said, I've run into a number of folks who insist that he is still one of the most important philosophers to read (in the sense of being capable of benefitting modern readers)—but I can never get them to say what any particular idea(s) he has that's useful or true/important but not already well known. And any ideas I came across in my own reading were either easily demonstrable to be incorrect (and which someone as intelligent as Plato never would have espoused if he lived with our modern knowledge), or I'd already run into them in other contexts.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwpMRCoVgSJ-rKyV1yhWljg

Philosophy does not rack up facts in some sort of storehouse of knowledge.

Much of the value of reading Plato is that he gets you to question your own assumptions and those of others, and does so in an accessible and easy to understand way.

What is justice? What is good? What is the best way to govern? What is true? Where does knowledge come from? Why should any of this matter?

Most people without any philosophical training go around acting like they have the answers to all of these questions, or that they're self-evident, or that they don't matter.

Plato helps us to see that we and various self-styled experts might not know as much about these as we thought.

Later philosophy tends to get more and more technical and jargon-filled, and (at least in Western philosophy) tends to assume a familiarity with Plato.

In many important ways, you would be either lost or missing an important piece of the puzzle were you to try to dive in to later philosophy without a knowledge of Plato, as philosophy to a large extent is a dialogue with earlier philosophers, of whom Plato is a seminal figure.

Plato is also a good sparring partner for when you're just dipping your feet in to the waters of philosophy. A boxer shouldn't expect to knock out the reigning heavyweight champion the first time he puts his boxing gloves on. Similarly, you should really have a go at Plato before you have a go at later philosophers, who themselves have engaged with Plato and tried to answer Plato or have another go at issues first raised by him.

A familiarity with philosophers from every historical period is just part of a well-rounded philosophical education. Skipping to contemporaries would just leave huge gaps in your education, especially if you skip some of the greatest and most influential philosophers of all time, like Plato.

I think your inference is partly true, but partly not true. In some cases, of course it is the case that by not saying "this is an easy way of misunderstanding" a particular claim does lead to Plato being misunderstood. But Plato is very much unlike Aristotle or the vast majority of other philosophers in that he wrote dialogues. These dialogues are (almost entirely) fictional, but they read more like a play than a treatise. So, it's not always the case that Plato is trying to be clearly understood in terms of propositions being conveyed in language.

For example, in the dialogue the Phaedo, Socrates is talking to two Pythagoreans about life and death. They ask Socrates to make arguments supporting their quasi-religious beliefs that the soul goes on after death, which Socrates does. But he does so in a very interesting way: the sequence of arguments keep pushing them until they become uncertain about their beliefs concerned the afterlife (which they then express).

So the question is: what does Plato actually want us to take away from this sequence of arguments? It seems, at least, that he is not coming at it head-on. He is not saying you should believe proposition P. Hence my scepticism that you claim is wholly true — that Plato is misunderstood because he failed to make himself clear. I do not think it is obvious that being clear was always Plato's ultimate goal. My suspicions are that he wanted to put the readers into a position where we have to figure out what we actually think is true, and what we think about the arguments themselves. I guess what I want to say here is that making himself clear, in the sense of stating propositions, is not obviously the goal of Plato.