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The misattribution may also be related to a statement about Plato's views made by Benjamin Jowett in the introduction to his translation of Plato's Republic (in which all the main ideas were attributed to Socrates, as in all of Plato's works), on p. cci of the third edition (1888): "Education is represented by him, not as the filling of a vessel, but as the turning the eye of the soul towards the light." Jowett seems to be loosely paraphrasing a statement Plato attributes to Socrates in a dialogue with Glaucon, in sections 518b–518c of book 7 of The Republic, where Socrates says: "education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes … But our present argument indicates that the true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body. (en) |
