Are We All Footnotes to Plato?

All human beings, and this is something that plato recognizes, its something that aristotle recognizes. So one of the things so striking about the nicomician ethics and also the republic, is the emphasis they place on early childhood. And there are similar metaphors in most world wisdom traditions of a human being. In the non western philosophical tradition, you have a similar metaphor. The buddhist tradition speaks of a person riding on an elephant. Ah. It's interesting that we are identified humanly with the rational part, and then of some sort of non human animal who's also co present.