[lordleft]

Not to minimize the significance of this but prohibiting a portion of a reading is like slapping a "parental warning" on a Rap CD in the 90s -- if I was an undergrad, I'd only want to read those excerpts more.

[petsfed]

The real barrier to students reading Plato has historically (and correctly) been the dismal quality of translations available. I always hated reading plato because the translations available to me were significantly more concerned with carrying into the modern day the wonky syntax and sentence structure of ancient Greek philosophical writing, and less concerned with translating the underlying ideas into language understandable by a 19 year-old engineering major who can barely spell their own name.

[pklausler]

I think that it would be easier to get younger people to study Quenya to be able to read fragments of Tolkien in the "original" than it would be to somehow get them to learn to read classical Greek. But it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek, and then there's a lifetime of really great stuff that opens up for one to enjoy.

[philistine]

Tell me about a complicated man. That's a translation!

[impossiblefork]

I read an excellent parallel Greek and English translation when I was a kid, probably the one in the Loeb Classical Library.

They probably had this attitude, but I didn't find it objectionable at all, and I'm not a native English speaker. If a 19-year old engineering student can't read that, even in his own language, what's the point? The guy's a bore.

I think it's probably better to just read them having picked them off a bookshelf than in a class though.

[dugidugout]

You act as if there are not companion or derivative works ad-nauseam. The barrier is hermeneutic, not grammatical, which is a fundamental constraint on shared meaning. Thus the "real barrier" is innate and your particular fixation only serves artificial ones. But please do add more than a complaint to our canon of meaning, I do not mean to devalue the act you are advocating, just the notion of neglect in this respect.

[evan_]

The difference is people wanted to listen to Eminem or whatever because it's enjoyable, trendy music that's played on the radio and all their friends were listening to.

Plato is not exactly burning up the airwaves right now. Most likely the only exposure most people will have to this work (or any of the libraries of work that's been banned in this manner) would be at college, assigned to them for a class.

[BLKNSLVR]

I think the point was more Streisand Effect than commentary on the popularity.

[UncleMeat]

The undergrads won't hear about it. The material will just silently not be on the syllabus and they'll never know. In this case the interference has broken containment, but this won't be the norm.

[gosub100]

Similar vein: reading in general is down, overall. Especially among young people. "Banning" a book isn't affecting anyone, it just gets a bunch of people riled up on two political tribes.

Now, if they actually banned a book, like "you will go to jail for having this" I would be concerned.