Yes. For one, because those are foundational texts of the western civilization. Even if Plato's text were insignificant, understanding one's civilization (in a way that goes beyond the pop culture of the day) remains as illuminating as ever.
Second, because texts written 100, 50, 20 and 1 year ago are still influenced by them, including seminal texts in their own right.
Third, because good philosophy (including theology) is perennial, not tied to this or that era. If anything, it will be this or that era that will come to pass, while Platos ideas (and other such inquiries) will still be around.
It's like Lisp: those who don't understand philosophy will construct their own philosophical system badly (or adopt wholesale some poorly made IKEA-grade one, adapted to appeal to consumers of their era -- from the plethora of self-help gurus to various pulp attempts at philosophizing).
> Third, because good philosophy (including theology) is perennial, not tied to this or that era
For historical relevance sure, but from what I can tell the rest of it has already passed its time.
> those who don't understand philosophy will construct their own philosophical system badly
This is a common defense I hear from philosophers: the 'real' philosophy is always around the corner—the 'real' interpretation, the 'real' way of doing it. But from what I can tell, 'real' is just a colorful expression of how positive their subjective experience of reading so-and-so was.
Or maybe the several hundred hours or so I've spent reading philosophy (or meta-philosophy, inquiring into the proper way of approaching it) is insufficient for me personally and I'll never 'really' understand Plato and others.
It’s too much to divorce a topic from philosophy and later go back to philosophy for a defense of its worth.
I wouldn't say there's much in it that has "passed its time". What would that be? It's not like in the era of Trump (or Hillary if you prefer) we have mastered good government. Or we can't benefit from inquiries about the nature of good, or the nature of the state because they're "old".
It's not like some great scientific discovery rendered those obsolete (and if so, only the most superficial parts), or like man changed in essence. We don't have any settled once and for all "better" arguments -- and those all arguments are still not just foundational, but very current.
Someone not familiar with them, still uses half of them (badly) when explaining their viewpoints or politics -- just like someone who doesn't know about parsers might be able to parse something, hooking together regular expressions and ad-hoc code, but not very rigorously, and missing an awful lot of tricks.
>This is a common defense I hear from philosophers: the 'real' philosophy is always around the corner—the 'real' interpretation, the 'real' way of doing it.
"Real philosophy" is not some rare event that arrives accompanied by some Michal Bay-styled revelation, with explosions and fireworks. It's an inquiry and a dialogue.
People have been really reading philosophy, real philosophy, -- and applying it to their lives and their states, for millennia.
Not sure why a philosopher (which are few and far between today, most are just tired tenured academics rehashing and elaborating on what others wrote. Original philosophers come once in a blue moon) would say that "real philosophy" is "around the corner".
If it was easy everyone would be doing it. There's nothing special about a traditional roundhouse kick anymore either. Various martial arts traditions figured out that bit of applied kinesthesiology ages ago. But mastering it still takes practice, practice, practice.
I do agree with you that you should not expect to uncover some magical idea in Plato's works. But this is certainly not what Plato intended us to do. Instead, what Plato is trying to do is encode philosophical practice. This entails not a collection of ideas (magical or not), but rather an approach to philosophical discourse and hence to the world. Curiosity and scepticism, as you correctly point out, are important and are recurrent themes. But this just scratches the surface.
I'd be curious to hear about any others.
Additionally, my understanding is that his actual argumentation is generally pretty bad and he's really just trying to convince people of things that the thinks would be effective for them. That's mostly coming from reading Bertrand Russel, but the fact that his arguments are bad (structurally, not just because of the data he's missing) seems to be uncontroversial from what I can tell.
Bertrand Russell, of course, is a master of logic. But if you are drawing from his History of Philosophy, I'm not sure that is a particularly good source for views on ancient philosophy. I tend to think the best way to justify a claim is to look at the primary sources themselves (if we have them—which in the case of Plato we are pretty sure we have everything he wrote and then some extras).
In terms of scratching the surface, much of what Plato contributes is ways to approach particular problems. For example, if you look at the treatment of universals in the Parmenides and the Philebus, the approaches in the arguments here (severally considered) have a lot of staying power: in particular, you find related arguments being made regarding universals by Aristotle and on, going all the way up to the present day (including, for example, Bertrand Russell). What is going on here is not merely philosophical scepticism (though there is that), but also approaching and techniques that need to be solved in order to make progress on a particular problem. So, that is an example of how the dialogues go beyond simple scepticism. There are so many other examples: the dialogues are packed with them — which is part of the reason why treatments of many modern philosophical problems and approaches can be traced back to Plato.
