This is our online intermediate course. To find out more details about our online courses please see our dedicated page here. To register please use our google form here (includes full list of dates).
Course theme:
The Symposium is undoubtedly one of the West’s philosophical and literary masterpieces – it inspires, teaches, initiates those who listen to its poetry, and, as Donald Levy says, “For anyone who wants to think philosophically about love, the only way to begin is to reflect on the problems first raised in Plato’s Symposium.”
More than any other dialogue, the Symposium is a drama: it delivers important messages through words and actions – and this is emphasized by Plato when he has Apollodorus say (at 173a) “since I first became a follower of Socrates, and began, as I have continued ever since, daily to observe and study all his sayings and actions.” Within this drama we have rhetoric, dialectic and divine inspiration – all carefully orchestrated by Plato in order to draw the reader into the mysteries of love.
Across the sessions we will be able to examine the whole dialogue, a symbolic and mysterious one, full of mythology. We will be mainly using Thomas Taylor’s translation- we can provide a discount for our student’s edition of the dialogue.
This is a 7 week course, taking place on Sundays at 6pm (UK time), starting in January 2026. We use zoom and share thoughts in between sessions on Slack. Full dates are: Sundays: Jan 18; February 1st and 15th; March 1st, 15th and 29th, and (after Easter) April 19th. If there is enough demand we will run a parallel course on Wednesdays at the same time: Jan 21st; February 4th and 18th; March 4th and 18th: (after Easter) April 15th and 22nd.
We encourage those in the UK to join in with our residential modules instead, bursaries are available.
If you would like to see other upcoming online courses please click the online tag under Event type above.