Philosophical Dogs

In Plato's Republic , Socrates argues that dogs’ tendency to bark at strangers and fawn over familiar people shows that they are philosophical (wisdom-loving): they love what they know, and this shows that they love knowledge. The passage is obviously at one level a joke, but it also shows us something very serious about Plato's understanding of wisdom and the human desire to achieve it. Plato construes the philosophers’ relation to the Forms on the model of friendship; he construes their wisdom as a superior version of the very same kind of acquaintance-knowledge one has of familiar people; and he construes the desire for knowledge as a desire to be intimate with—friends with—reality.