This is a recording of the live feed for the third Dr. Sadler's Philosophy forum, where I started out by discussing Plato as an author, his views about mimesis and poetic production, and how these views of his give us hints about the status of his own work. After that, I fielded questions and comments from viewers.

Plato's works are rather paradoxical, in that on one level he appears to devalue or denigrate mimesis and poetry, while at the same time, he uses both of them to great advantage in the dialogues themselves.

Viewers were not only be able to watch and listen, but also be able to participate by writing questions and comments either on the page for the event or in the Q&A interface.

I've been asked about suggested readings for this hangout.  I ended up touching on the following dialogues by Plato:  Ion, Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic, Meno, Protagorus -- and perhaps others as well. 

Although the translations a rather old, I'm a big fan of having at one's fingertips the one-volume "Collected Dialogues of Plato" http://amzn.to/1jJGy6a

I'm also a fan of publicly available online texts, and you can find them at MIT's Internet Classics Archive http://classics.mit.edu/Browse/browse-Plato.html