Plato at the Googleplex

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein structures this work as an alternation between expository scholarly chapters and fictional dialogues in which the ancient Greek philosopher Plato appears as a character in twenty-first-century America. The book's central argument is that philosophy has made genuine progress over the past 2,400 years, and that this progress, far from rendering Plato obsolete, demonstrates the power of the self-critical process he set in motion. Goldstein asks the reader to accept one preposterous premise: that Plato could turn up in our time, on a book tour, and engage with contemporary questions continuous with those he first raised.

In the Prologue, Goldstein states that Plato got much wrong, as one would expect from a thinker who lived so long ago. His singular achievement was not arriving at final answers but carving out the field of philosophy itself, framing its fundamental questions across ethics, politics, art, mathematics, religion, love, the mind, personal identity, and knowledge. She acknowledges his remoteness as a historical figure, compounded by his choice to write in dialogues, and compares this elusiveness to Shakespeare's. The wildly contradictory characterizations scholars have imposed on Plato illustrate the depth of the interpretive problem. Philosophical progress is invisible, she contends, because conclusions once tortuously secured by argument become shared intuitions so obvious that we forget their origins.

The first expository chapter argues that Plato could stroll into any graduate philosophy seminar and recognize the techniques still in use. Goldstein introduces "philosophy-jeerers," scientists who dismiss philosophy, and quotes cosmologist Lawrence Krauss's claim that philosophy makes no progress. She counters by showing that Krauss's position presupposes philosophical commitments, including Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion (the principle that scientific claims must be testable and potentially disprovable) and the doctrine of scientific realism (the view that science describes a mind-independent reality). She formulates the "Fate-of-Philosophy Equation," in which the set of philosophical problems approaches the null set, or empty set, as time approaches infinity, and asks whether this equation is true, calling it the book's overriding concern. She introduces "Platonism" as the view that mathematical reality exists independently of us and is discovered rather than invented, and presents Plato's "Sublime Braid," the intertwining of truth, beauty, and goodness, as a persistent metaphysical doctrine. Plato's conception of goodness, she explains, is "the best reason" determining reality to be as it is: not a design imposed by a deity but a self-starting principle whereby the best explanation explains itself.

The first fictional dialogue places Plato at Google headquarters. His media escort, Cheryl, a practical-minded guide, narrates the day to her friend Rhonda. Over lunch, Plato tells Cheryl about his mentor Socrates' trial and execution and recounts his disastrous attempt to put philosophical ideas into practice in Syracuse under the tyrant Dionysius II. A software engineer named Marcus proposes an Ethical Answers Search Engine (EASE) that could crowd-source moral answers using algorithms modeled on Google's PageRank. Plato counters that any such algorithm must contain substantive ethical presuppositions built into its ordering system, requiring the very philosophical expertise EASE was meant to eliminate. Cheryl, deeply unsettled, later wrestles with the possibility that future generations will condemn present-day moral blind spots just as we condemn slavery, and concludes that moral progress requires persistent philosophical argument.

The next expository chapter traces the Greek "Ethos of the Extraordinary" from its Homeric origins through Athenian democracy. Goldstein explains kleos, or "acoustic renown," as the pre-philosophical Greek answer to what makes a life worth living: One must live so as to be spoken about, gaining a kind of immortality through others' representations. She situates this within the wider Axial Age (roughly 800 to 200 B.C.E.), when civilizations from Hebrew monotheism to Buddhism developed responses to the question of human mattering. She traces how Socrates radically revised the Ethos by substituting "unexamined" for "unexceptional," prying aretē (excellence or virtue) away from kleos and politicized civic duty, making him a heretic against Athenian values. She discusses the Republic's treatment of justice, arguing that Plato's project is to show that moral truths dictate the nature of politics, not the reverse.

The second fictional dialogue places Plato on a panel at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, discussing child-rearing with Dr. Mitzi Munitz, a Viennese-trained psychoanalyst who renounced psychoanalysis; "warrior mother" Sophie Zee; and moderator Zachary Burns. Plato complicates both Munitz's anti-achievement stance and Zee's pro-mastery position by arguing that freedom consists not in having many choices but in having one's choices determined by one's own better nature. He wins Munitz over by describing her life's work as embodying the qualities he requires of his ideal rulers. Munitz then delivers a culminating challenge: Plato's faith in a perfect state is incompatible with Socrates' insight that we think we know what we do not, because humanity should never be frozen into any single vision of the best.

The chapter on erotic love examines the Greek institution of paiderastia, a socially structured form of same-sex love intertwining the educational and the erotic, and Plato's treatment of love in the Symposium. Goldstein provides an extensive sketch of Alcibiades as the embodiment of the Ethos of the Extraordinary taken to dangerous extremes. His overreach included convincing the Athenian assembly to undertake the risky Sicilian expedition, and the treachery came afterward, when he defected to Sparta upon being recalled to Athens. Plato uses Alcibiades to exonerate Socrates of the charge of corrupting the youth: Alcibiades loved Socrates but was never transformed by that love. A subsequent fictional chapter casts Plato as an expert consultant for advice columnist Margo Howard, responding to readers' questions about love and distinguishing good from bad forms of erotic madness.

The chapter on Socrates' trial reconstructs 399 B.C.E. Goldstein details the political upheaval forming its backdrop: Athens' defeat in the Peloponnesian War, the brutal reign of the Thirty (an oligarchy that ruled from September 404 to May 403), and the amnesty formalized in the oath me mnesikakein ("not to remember past wrongs"). She analyzes the Euthyphro's argument that morality cannot be grounded in divine authority, the "Euthyphro Dilemma," calling it one of the most important arguments in the history of moral philosophy. She analyzes the Apology, arguing that Socrates deliberately provoked the jury by declaring the unexamined life not worth living, comparing Athens to a lazy horse and himself to a gadfly, and proposing free meals at the Prytaneum (the civic dining hall for honored citizens) as his "penalty." A fictional dialogue then places Plato on an aggressive cable news show hosted by Roy McCoy, where Plato argues that virtue and happiness are inseparable and compares McCoy's approach to a pastry maker who gratifies rather than nourishes.

The penultimate expository chapter synthesizes the book's arguments around the Myth of the Cave from the Republic. Goldstein frames the central epistemological tension as a conflict between "Reasonables," who hold that knowledge must be publicly accessible, and "Unreasonables," who accept that some truths can only be apprehended through singular experience. Plato's soul, she argues, was divided between these two positions. She reads the prisoners' condition as ideological imprisonment and traces the ascent through levels corresponding to Plato's Divided Line, from shadows through mathematics to the Forms (abstract entities explaining the identities of concrete particulars) and finally to agathon (the form of the good), the self-explanatory level where all explanations terminate through the confluence of truth, beauty, and goodness. The former prisoner's return represents Plato's view that contemplation of impersonal reality produces moral transformation. Goldstein catalogs the many Platos that have existed through the ages and offers her own: an impassioned mathematician, wary poet, exacting ethicist, and reluctant political theorist who teaches that no view should be taken as the final word.

The final fictional dialogue places Plato in a neuroscience laboratory, volunteering for a brain scan. Neuroscientist Dr. David Shoket dismisses philosophy as obsolete, but Plato recounts the argument from the Phaedo that even a complete neural description would omit explanations in terms of meaning and value. Shoket's graduate student, Agatha Fine, connects Plato's charioteer metaphor for the psyche to Shoket's research on the mesolimbic dopaminergic pathway (the brain's reward circuitry), arguing that personhood cannot be eliminated simply because it plays no role at the level of synapses. Plato proposes replacing "free will" with "accountability," the practice of offering reasons, evaluating them, and potentially changing minds. The book closes as they slide the philosopher into the scanner, leaving the image of the thinker whose brain is being studied by the very science whose philosophical implications he has been questioning.