Plato's understanding of passion

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While both speak of reason and intellect and wisdom and knowledge (and a host of other topics) they are all conceptualised very differently. For Plato, reasoning is the highest and best and that which makes humans unique. While reasoning is also held to be of importance by Buddhists, it is conceptualised not in terms of essential logic of is and is-not nor ontologically, which for Plato is a realm of forms (and this form is so very different from the forms used in Buddhist context) but rather as a relative and conventional form of thinking.

WHat are the consequences of having these differences? A very prominent difference is the following- Plato never goes onto explicitly talk about what is desire or what is wisdom except passing comments. And his dialogical reasoning is what one may call Platonic dialect. He certainly does not speak of compassion. This is not only about Republic, but in general about any of the other Platonic texts. Buddhists on the other hand, make compassion a core and have important distinctions in reasoning and wisdom, interms of characteristics and gradations of development.

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