Introduction : approaching Plato's dialogues -- The mouthpiece interpretation -- The anti-mouthpiece interpretation -- A Socratic interpretation of the concept of art as mimesis -- Conclusion : appreciating Plato's dialogues.

Plato's Dialogues One by One interprets and contextualizes each of Plato's dialogues. Victorino Tejera analyzes and explains the content and intellectual quality of the dialogues, highlighting their dramatic aliveness and historico-political allusiveness. He treats each dialogue according to its own integrity, not imposing any system outside of their individual composition, and with an even-handedness that does not place too much emphasis on any aspect or neglect any included concept. With this approach, Tejera seeks to free Plato from (...) the constraints constructed by Academia and to treat him as the open-minded intellectual son of Socrates, releasing the free-flying swan that in the myth became the home of the soul of the master. (shrink)

The history of scholarship, philosophical or otherwise, about Plato and his writings reveals a quandary pertaining to the interpretation of the contents of Plato's dialogues. To understand Plato one must come to terms with this problem: how ought Plato's writings to be interpreted?

Coleen Zoller - Interpreting Plato's Dialogues - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.3 486-487 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Coleen Zoller Susquehanna University J. Angelo Corlett. Interpreting Plato's Dialogues. Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2005. Pp. xii + 137. Cloth, $28.00. In Interpreting Plato's Dialogues, J. Angelo Corlett succeeds at offering a concise summary of various competing answers to the question of how Plato's (...) class='Hi'>dialogues ought to be interpreted. The significance of the question is rooted in the fact that one's assumptions about Plato's mode of expression inevitably influence how one interprets the dialogues. Meanwhile, the question is bewildering because, as Corlett quotes Woodruff, "reading.. (shrink)

These essays by philosophers, philologists and historians exemplify both the pluralism and shared values of recent scholarship on Plato's dialogues and philosophy. They emphasise the interdependence of ideas, literary and dramatic elements, and the historical and cultural contexts.

Despite Plato's various warnings not to do so, his dialogues have been studied as systematic philosophy since antiquity. In this innovative and controversial reassessment, James Arieti argues that they should be read primarily as works of drama rather than philosophical discourse. Analyses of 18 of the 28 dialogues allow the reader to see them as integrated dramas, with all the ambiguities and uncertainties that literary works contain. As in plays generally, the arguments of particular characters cannot be seen (...) as the opinions of the author, whose views emerge only from examining each work as a whole. This literary reading shows how much of the debate about Plato's meaning has been misplaced. Instead of demonstrating that an argument is fallacious or valid, we need to ask why Plato has the particular character make the argument. Interpreting Plato achieves what no other work on Plato has attempted: to see the philosophical arguments as serving a dramatic purpose. (shrink)

Bolotin’s work consists of a very literal translation of the Lysis and a detailed commentary, which pays attention to what is only implied as well as to what is actually stated by the dialogue’s characters. The translation is a model of precision; an occasionally awkward expression is a small price to pay for the faithfulness to the original text provided for the Greekless reader.

Dr Brandwood's book presents a factual and critical account of the more important of the various attempts that have been made to establish the order of composition of Plato's dialogues by analysing his diction and prose style. Plato's literary activity covered fifty years and there is almost no direct evidence, either external or internal, to help in establishing the relative order of his writings. Until the middle of the nineteenth century people were dependent on personal interpretation of the probable (...) line of development of Plato's thought and doctrines, but then a less subjective method was discovered, which relied instead on the observation of changes in Plato's prose style. Dr Brandwood examines the investigations of each scholar individually, checking the correctness of the methodology and the accuracy of the statistics, before arriving at fairly definite conclusions of his own, at least as far as the works of Plato's middle and old age are concerned. (shrink)

In this essay, Seddon provides a brief rejoinder to Long's reply to his review of the monograph Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand. Despite his criticisms, Seddon maintains that reading Long's monograph will pay rewards for all those interested in the history of philosophy as it impacts Ayn Rand's thought.

In reply to Seddon's charge that Long's analysis in Reason and Value rests on a mistaken reading of Plato, Long both defends his interpretation of Plato and argues that nothing in Reason and Value depends on Plato interpretation in any case.

Along with fresh interpretations of Plato, this book proposes a radically new approach to reading him, one that can teach us about protreptic, as it is called, by reimagining the ways in which Socrates engages in it. Protreptic, as it is conceived in the book, is an attempt to bring about a fundamental change of heart in people so that they want truth more than anything else. In taking the approach developed in this book, one doesn't try to get Plato (...) right but simply uses his dialogues as a theoretical tool for gaining insight into protreptic. The book argues that by analyzing Socrates' behavior in the right way, one can better understand how to foster thoughtfulness nowadays, and there is a need to foster it, in part since the health of democracy is at stake. (shrink)

In Plato's Ion & Meno, Socrates questions Ion, an actor who just won a major prize, about his ability to interpret the epic poetry of Homer. As the dialogue proceeds, the nature of human creativity emerges as a mysterious process and an unsolved puzzle. A similar discussion between Socrates and Meno probes the subject of ethics. Can goodness be taught? If it can, then we should be able to find teachers capable of instructing others about what is good and bad, (...) right and wrong, or just and unjust. Socrates and Meno are unable to identify teachers of ethics, and we are left wondering how such knowledge could be acquired. The text is presented in an updated version of the Jowett translation, which helps to bring the work to life for students and non-academic audiences. (shrink)

This is an English translation of one of the more challenging and enigmatic of Plato's dialogues between Socrates and Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, that begins with Zeno defending his treatise of Parmenidean monism against those partisans of plurality. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato's immediate (...) audience. (shrink)

Mr. Brumbaugh gives several accounts in the course of his work of the main purpose of his study, and the emphasis falls now one way and now another. Readers may easily be misled by the opening sentence of the introduction, which suggests that Plato's mathematical illustrations are pointers to "diagrams which Plato had designed, and were intended to accompany and clarify his text." If that is what Mr. Brumbaugh intended, he has failed to make out his case. There is no (...) direct evidence that Plato designed diagrams; and there is some good inferential evidence to the contrary. It would be surprising, for example, if Plato's diagrams had survived that long, that Aristotle should have described the Divided Line in terms of an arithmetical progression and ignored Plato's express indication of proportion between the upper and lower segments. Mr. Brumbaugh himself faces this passage and admits that "no continuous tradition connects the figures of Hellenistic scholars with Plato's original design." But it really does not matter. If we design diagrams in the light of our knowledge of Plato's mathematical imagination, it is most certainly a help to the interpretation of the passages concerned. This, as a matter of fact, seems to be Mr. Brumbaugh's main reason for ascribing the diagrams to Plato, and while the conclusion does not follow, the premiss is correct; and the premiss, not the conclusion, is the main point at issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading Plato's Dialogues to Enhance Learning and Inquiry: Exploring Socrates' Use of Protreptic for Student Engagement by Mason MarshallWilliam PerrinMARSHALL, Mason. Reading Plato's Dialogues to Enhance Learning and Inquiry: Exploring Socrates' Use of Protreptic for Student Engagement. New York: Routledge, 2021. 223 pp. Cloth, $136.00; paper, $39.16One doesn't need to search to find criticism of contemporary democratic citizens. We are told we are an ignorant, dogmatic, (...) and generally vicious bunch. These traits, it's natural to think, make trouble for our democracy. One solution, Mason Marshall argues, is to read Plato to reform our vicious tendencies. This might be surprising, considering Plato is sometimes portrayed as a great enemy of democracy. But Marshall doesn't propose to read Plato to find out what Plato thought, or to mine his dialogues for promising arguments. Rather, Marshall proposes to read Plato to develop a theory of philosophical protreptic. "Protreptic," as used by Marshall, means to turn someone toward a new end. And thus, philosophical protreptic is turning someone "so that they want truth more than anything else." The idea, then, is to use Plato to protrepticize students, in order to cultivate democracy-required character traits in students.There are, broadly speaking, two parts to the book. Marshall, in one part, sketches two ways of carrying out his project, a top-down approach (chapter 1) and a bottom-up approach (chapter 2), before putting the project in action to illustrate its value (chapter 5). In the second part of the book, Marshall defends his project from the charge that it's an illegitimate approach to Plato scholarship (chapter 3) and from the charge that his approach would not be sufficiently valuable (chapter 4). Surprisingly, given the stated aim of the book, chapters 3 and 4 take up the bulk of the pages. I offer an explanation of this striking feature below. But first, I follow Marshall's structure in summarizing the two parts.Marshall begins with the top-down approach. The reader would suppose that above all else Socrates aims to foster self-examination in his interlocutors, before imagining various strategies Socrates could have pursued to satisfy this end. The reader evaluates the various imagined strategies, not for whether they are the ones Socrates uses in the text but for how well they would achieve the end. For example, one might think that Socrates, in order to protrepticize Euthyphro, must convince Euthyphro that he needs to be able to cogently answer philosophical questions, if only so that he does not look foolish when facing them. The reader would then sketch thought experiments varying along the axis of harshness—how abrasive Socrates' humiliation of Euthyphro must be—before evaluating which scenario would most likely lead to self-examination.The bottom-up approach proceeds in the opposite order: One starts by wondering what the intermediate ends motivating Socrates' actual behavior in the dialogues could be. For example, one would ask why Socrates muddies the waters in offering convoluted definitions of piety in the Euthyphro (11e7–12d4). It could be that Socrates wants to make Euthyphro look silly, that Socrates wants to overwhelm him, or that Socrates wants Euthyphro to agree to a view Socrates is anxious to refute. It could be all three. But the idea is to identify the strategies that make the [End Page 353] most sense of the supposition that Socrates aims, above all else, to foster self-examination, before evaluating them for their likelihood of turning someone to self-examination.Marshall, in the second part of the book, defends his approach from the objection that, since his project isn't aiming to articulate the content of Plato's mental states, or mining for arguments, he is co-opting Plato illegitimately. The basic defense is that we would have to know much more about Plato's intentions than we do for the charge to stick. In short, given that we are largely unable to articulate the assumptions we have regarding what goods an interpretation of a text will win us, we will be unable to arbitrate between radically different, yet internally coherent, interpretations of Plato.It is initially puzzling why Marshall spends... (shrink)

In Plato's Ion & Meno, Socrates questions Ion, an actor who just won a major prize, about his ability to interpret the epic poetry of Homer. As the dialogue proceeds, the nature of human creativity emerges as a mysterious process and an unsolved puzzle. A similar discussion between Socrates and Meno probes the subject of ethics. Can goodness be taught? If it can, then we should be able to find teachers capable of instructing others about what is good and bad, (...) right and wrong, or just and unjust. Socrates and Meno are unable to identify teachers of ethics, and we are left wondering how such knowledge could be acquired. The text is presented in an updated version of the Jowett translation, which helps to bring the work to life for students and non-academic audiences. (shrink)

Plato's "Ion," despite its frail frame and traditionally modest status in the corpus, has given rise to large exegetical claims. Thus some historians of aesthetics, reading it alongside page 205 of the Symposium, have sought to identify in it the seeds of the post-Kantian notion of 'art' as non-technical making, and to trace to it the Romantic conception of the poet as a creative genius. Others have argued that, in the "Ion," Plato has Socrates assume the existence of a technē (...) of poetry. In this article, these claims are challenged on exegetical and philosophical grounds. To this effect, Plato's use of poiētēs and poiēsis in the Symposium is analysed, the defining criteria of technē in the "Ion" and other dialogues are identified and discussed, and the 'Romantic' interpretation of the dialogue is traced to Shelley's tendentious translation of it. These critical developments lead to what is presented as a more faithful reading of the dialogue. In the "Ion," it is claimed, Plato seeks to subvert the traditional status of poetry by having Socrates argue that poetry is both non-rational and non-cognitive in nature. In the third part of the article, suggestions are offered as to the contribution made by the "Ion" to the evolution of Plato's reflections on poetic composition, and particularly as to the reasons which later induced Plato to substitute the concept of mimesis for that of inspiration in his account of poetry. (shrink)

Faced with the difficult task of discerning Plato’s true ideas from the contradictory voices he used to express them, scholars have never fully made sense of the many incompatibilities within and between the dialogues. In the magisterial _Plato’s Philosophers_, Catherine Zuckert explains for the first time how these prose dramas cohere to reveal a comprehensive Platonic understanding of philosophy. To expose this coherence, Zuckert examines the dialogues not in their supposed order of composition but according to the (...) dramatic order in which Plato indicates they took place. This unconventional arrangement lays bare a narrative of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. In the drama’s earliest dialogues, for example, non-Socratic philosophers introduce the political and philosophical problems to which Socrates tries to respond. A second dramatic group shows how Socrates develops his distinctive philosophical style. And, finally, the later dialogues feature interlocutors who reveal his philosophy’s limitations. Despite these limitations, Zuckert concludes, Plato made Socrates the dialogues’ central figure because Socrates raises the fundamental human question: what is the best way to live? Plato’s dramatization of Socratic imperfections suggests, moreover, that he recognized the apparently unbridgeable gap between our understandings of human life and the nonhuman world. At a time when this gap continues to raise questions—about the division between sciences and the humanities and the potentially dehumanizing effects of scientific progress—Zuckert’s brilliant interpretation of the entire Platonic corpus offers genuinely new insights into worlds past and present. (shrink)

The paper argues that Plato’s dialogue form creates a Quinean “opaque context” that segregates the assertions by Plato’s characters in the dialogues from both Plato and the real world with the result that the dialogues require a hermeneutical interpretation. Sec. I argues that since the assertions in the dialogues are located inside an opaque context, the forms of life of the characters in the dialogues acquires primary philosophical importance for Plato. The second section argues (...) that the thesis of Sec. I coheres with the claim in Plato’s Seventh Letter that since philosophical truth is incommunicable by means of language it is of primary importance for philosophers to develop proper “schemes of living”. Sec. III argues since the forms of life of the characters portrayed in the dialogues is of primary philosophical importance for Plato, and since hermeneutical methods are required to interpret emerging forms of life, Plato’s dialogues are positively crafted to be read hermeneutically. Sec IV argues that Heidegger, who is famous for seeing Plato’s views as antithetical to his own hermeneutical approach, is mistaken, and that Plato’s real views are, in principle, more akin to Heidegger’s views than he thinks. (shrink)

In this supplementary volume, a number of renowned scholars of Plato reflect upon their interpretive methods. Topics covered include the use of ancient authorities in interpreting Plato's dialogues, Plato's literary and rhetorical style, his arguments and characters, and his use of the dialogue form. The collection is not intended as a comprehensive survey of methodological approaches; rather it offers a number of different perspectives and clearly articulated interpretations by leading scholars in the field.

Can an empirisist theory of memory be identifi ed in Plato’s dialogues? Research in the dialogues and reconstructing the pertinent references convinced me that- along with the multi-discussed and generally accepted concept of memory within Plato’s metaphysical framework of the theory of knowledge- an empirisist version of memory is utilized by the Athenian philosopher in his argumentations, concerning mainly epistemological issues and problems; in fact, given the republished metaphysical concept of memory, one cannot fi nd, beyond (...) the orthodox, old interpretation related to metempsychosis, ies attributing to Plato such, perhaps heretic, parallel use of sensorymaterial and empiricist structures. Moreover, I contend that the empiricist version of memory is related, or, can be considered, as a precursor, to a great extent, to the so called empirical theory of memory; the theory where memory is a necessary and decsively functioning constituent to the new and modern theory of knowledge. (shrink)

Plato's Sophist provides a careful translation of the Sophist, one of Plato's most complex and difficult dialogues, and includes materials designed to facilitate its usefulness as a text in college courses. The translation employs a minimum of interpretative paraphrasing while being presented in clear, readable English. Special attention has been given to consistency in translating key Greek terms. The book presents a special list of these terms and discusses them in the endnotes. The result is a translation that enables (...) the reader who lacks a knowledge of Greek to get much closer than usual to the original text. Cobb's introduction contains a detailed summary of the entire dialogue, clarifying the main themes and the general structure. He offers a fresh interpretation of the dialogue that shows how each theme contributes to the exploration of the nature of, and the relation between, philosophy and sophistry. The introduction is particularly useful to first readers of the Sophist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues by Andrea NightingaleMarina Berzins McCoyAndrea Nightingale. Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 308. Hardback, $39.99.Andrea Nightingale has written a scholarly work that will prove indispensable to restoring the centrality of religion and theology to Platonic philosophy. She demonstrates that Plato uses the language of Greek religion to inform his metaphysics and his very conception (...) of philosophy. She deftly interweaves classical scholarship with close readings of a wide range of texts in order to build her claims. She gives especially good treatments of Eleusinian mysteries and Orphic ritual. She also explores the way in which the epiphanic nature of the encounter with the Forms has a transforming influence on the philosopher's soul.In the introduction, Nightingale presents an overview of key "divinity markers" (8–23) present in the dialogues—occurrences in which the Forms are described as godlike, references to Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries, poetic narratives of epiphanic encounters, and references to the sacred spectacle. She also assesses why these references are so often overlooked in contemporary scholarship, noting many contemporary scholars' unfamiliarity with the specific nature of Greek religion, and a general movement toward secularism in philosophy. She acknowledges some notable exceptions (e.g. Mark McPherran's work), but she might have given attention to others as well. Specifically, Jill Gordon's Plato's Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) characterizes Platonic philosophy in terms of both striving for and alienation from the divine, and Ross Romero's Without the Least Tremor: The Sacrifice of Socrates in Plato's Phaedo (Albany: SUNY Press, 2009) on religious sacrifice in the Phaedo is another example. Still, Nightingale is accurate in her assessment of the field's tendency to ignore religious language or to assimilate it too quickly to later monotheistic traditions. Her book convincingly argues that religious language can serve a philosophical purpose in suggesting how union with Beauty and the Good is experienced. The book as a whole provides precious information about many connections between Greek religion and culture that add depth and richness to particular Platonic passages.Chapter 1 sketches out a theory of the Forms and argues that as a group they are treated as "divine." The Phaedo connects the Forms to concepts of eternality, unchangingness, and intelligibility (50). Human beings can connect with the Forms through contemplation (51). Similarly, the Republic describes the Forms as divine and the soul that contemplates them as undergoing a kind of divinization. The Form of the Good is the highest divinity, and its pursuit is an encounter with the divine. Nightingale notes that this does not mean that the Good can be grasped completely. But insofar as we can contemplate the Forms, Plato thinks that we can come to know the Good and become more like it.In chapter 2, Nightingale turns to the topic of human longing, focusing on the Symposium. We humans, Plato believes, have two different but related kinds of longing for immortality. While human beings long for a divine kind of immortality that is ultimately unreachable, they can have a partial kind of immortality through desiring the Good and giving birth to "children" of the soul. The vision of the Beautiful can be a kind of divine epiphany that leads to wonder. Nightingale delves more deeply into the concept of epiphany through texts such as the Homeric Hymn to Dionysius and Herodotus, as well as sanctuary inscriptions. Epiphanies validate the Greek religious system. Similarly, Plato's metaphysics is validated [End Page 149] by a philosophical vision of the Forms. Nightingale's detailed account of Eleusinian mysteries brings together a wide range of source material with which many philosophers will be unfamiliar, and which is especially valuable for scholars seeking to interpret Platonic passages that allude to the mysteries. Nightingale also offers an engaging interpretation of Alcibiades as one who has encountered the divine in Socrates yet failed to understand it, and so has "profaned" the mysteries in the context of human relationship (107–13).Chapter 3 examines Socrates's accounts of the soul and immortality in the Phaedo. Whereas those... (shrink)

This essay articulates obstacles to an interpretation of the whole proper to Plato’s philosophy that are rooted in the general methodical principle of traditional hermeneutics, and then addresses them by a novel hermeneutic application of Husserl’s transcendental and eidetic reductions. This application involves disclosing the transcendental phenomena of the texts of Plato’s dialogues on the basis of the former and articulating their phenomenological essence in accord with the latter. A meta-hermeneutical argument for what Plato himself might have (...) thought is then ventured, which takes as its point of departure both the transcendental phenomena of his texts and Aristotle’s report that eide for him were in some sense arithmoi. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: -/- [99] JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:1 JANUARY 198 5 Book Reviews Kenneth Dorter. Plato's 'Phaedo': An Interpretation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. Pp. xi + 233. $28.50. Kenneth Dorter of the University of Guelph has given us a useful and unusual study of the Phaedo, which will attract the interest of a variety of Plato's readers. He provides the careful studies of the dialogue's (...) arguments for immortality to be expected in a sound commentary, paying close attention to the text as well as to recent scholarship, and displaying a good sense of argument. What gives the book additional interest, however, are its features as an interpretation of the Phaedo. Two stand out. First, Dorter wishes to give full weight not only to the logic of the arguments but also to the dramatic details of Plato's writing, believing these to be important in disclosing Plato's intentions. Secondly, he reads the Phaedo in light of a more general understanding of Plato's philosophy, especially the nature of the soul in its cosmic as well as individual aspects. Much of this is set out in a final speculative chapter, where Dorter seeks to make intelligible Plato's developing conception of soul by means of such notions as energy and poles of consciousness. Not every reader will be persuaded; but Dorter is to be commended for an attempt to move the discussion beyond the Phaedo and Plato's own vocabulary. The study gains its coherence from Dorter's belief that Plato's view of soul cannot support the ostensible aim of the dialogue, to provide reassurance of personal immortality. Although he has no doubt that for the Platonic Socrates there is "a meaningful sense in which we may be called immortal" (94, cf. 159), Dorter's analysis must be stretched to provide that sense. In part this is a result of his assessment of the arguments. The first, from reciprocity in nature, can at most show that, given the eternal nature of the world, soul and corporeality in general must continue to exist. The argument from recollection can point only to a non-empirical element in our knowledge ; that from the soul's kinship with the divine is best seen as an analogy developed to awaken within us a sense of eternity. The final argument, though containing fallacies (157), will support the conclusion that immortal soul is imperishable as long as soul is regarded as motive force in the universe, in the first argument's sense. In none of these discussions, then, can Plato's reasoning yield up personal survival. But there is another part to Dorter's case, underlying this conclusion. For Plato the individual human being is a composite of soul and body; so even if Plato were to prove the immortality of the soul he could never establish personal survival (63-64). It is not surprising then that Dorter is left with a doctrine of immortality either reduced to a "discovery of eternity within ourselves" (77), or else dissolved into a principle of enduring cosmic energy. So in neither case does it seem meaningful for Plato to say that we are immortal: the eternal which we sense is no more us than it is anything else. Although it is of course possible that Plato did not intend this consequence of his arguments, Dorter thinks otherwise. In support he invokes literary features of the dialogue to argue that Plato operates on one level for the less sophisticated (who wish to be persuaded of personal survival) and on another for the philosophically reflective reader. Dorter treats the textual evidence for this claim with an appropriate modesty, and tries to justify Plato's apparent duplicity as an attempt to convince the weak by a 'noble lie' (95-97). Nevertheless this leads Dorter to mix together too quickly for this reader popular religion, myth, and metaphor. To the fact that Plato does not espouse the language of popular religion literally, Dorter adds his own view of myth as an imaginative appeal to emotion that can be translated without loss into rational discourse (7, 165, a95). So the accounts of the afterlife at 8oc-84 b... (shrink)

Turnbull offers a close and detailed reading of the Parmenides, using his interpretation to illuminate Plato's major late dialogues. The picture presented of Plato's later philosophy is plausible, highly interesting, and original.

Acknowledging the powerful impact that Plato's dialogues have had on readers, Jill Gordon shows how the literary techniques Plato used function philosophically to engage readers in doing philosophy and attracting them toward the philosophical life. The picture of philosophical activity emerging from the dialogues, as thus interpreted, is a complex process involving vision, insight, and emotion basic to the human condition rather than a resort to pure reason as an escape from it. Since the literary features of Plato's (...) writing are what draw the reader into philosophy, the book becomes an argument for the union of philosophy and literature—and against their disciplinary bifurcation—in the dialogues. Gordon construes the relationship of Plato's text to its audience as an analogue of Socrates' relationship with his interlocutors in the dialogues, seeing both as fundamentally dialectic. On this insight she builds her detailed analysis of specific literary devices in chapters on dramatic form, character development, irony, and image-making. In this way Gordon views Plato as not at all the enemy of the poets and image-makers that previous interpreters have depicted. Rather, Gordon concludes that Plato understands the power of words and images quite well. Since they, and not logico-deductive argumentation, are the appropriate means for engaging human beings, he uses them to great effect and with a sensitive understanding of human psychology, wary of their possible corrupting influences but ultimately willing to harness their power for philosophical ends. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Arthur A. Krentz DRAMATIC FORM AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONTENT IN PLATO'S DIALOGUES AN intriguing innovation in the history of philosophical discourse is Plato's employment ofdramatic dialogues as his deliberately chosen means ofcommunication. Throughout the history of philosophy scant attention has been focused on this feature of Plato's works. Recently, however, some students of Plato's writings contend that it is crucial for interpreters to give careful attention to the (...) dialogue form in order to reach an essential understanding of the philosophical content. Thus WernerJaeger, commenting in 1934 on the importance of the form of Aristotle's philosophical works, mentions as an aside that, "Even in the case of Plato, the importance of the form for the understanding of his particular thought has often been overlooked for long periods; departmental philosophers and students ofliterature in particular are always prone to consider it as something literary which had no material significance for Plato, in spite of the fact that it is unique in die history of philosophy. By now, however, most persons know mat the study of the development of the form ofhis writing is one of me main keys to a philosophical understanding of him." ' In spite ofJaeger's contention that most contemporary interpreters of Plato are aware of the significance of investigating the dramatic form for an understanding of a dialogue's content, a survey of the literature on Plato shows that interpreters often abandon such a concern in their own approach to his dialogues. For example, many interpreters treat dialogues as treatises, ignoring the dramatic features in order to concentrate on the examination of the logical, epistemológica!, ethical or other philosophical aspects of the argumentation in a single dialogue or group ofdialogues; as a result interpreters tend to separate the content from the form of Plato's works.2 The effect of this approach is one-sided, for, although such interpretations attempt to do justice to the arguments, they ignore the dramatic features of the dialogues and their bearing on an interpretation of die philosophical substance. Currently a growing number of interpreters of Plato in Europe and North America hold that a consideration of the form of Plato's dialogues is important 32 Arthur A. Krentz33 for an understanding oftheir content and philosophical message.3 1 am in agreement with this position and in this article I consider some reasons that may have led Plato to adopt dialogue as his medium of philosophical expression and attempt to show how attention to the dialogue form shapes the interpretation of their content. Unlike his philosophical predecessors who cast their writings in the form of extended poems, aphorisms, or treatises "On Nature," Plato wrote dramas. That the dramatic form ofhis writings is not incidental to his philosophical purposes becomes apparent as one considers how Plato presents philosophy in a fundamentally different way from that of his predecessors and successors who adopted the essay and treatise as the paradigm ofphilosophical communication. In a philosophical work such as a treatise, an author ordinarily attempts to state his own position on issues under discussion as clearly and as forcefully as possible. This, however, is not the primary aim of Plato's works, for certain features of his dramas indicate that he deliberately concealed his own views. Of special note in this regard is the fact that Plato never speaks on his own behalf in the discourses he creates. There is no character named "Plato" unequivocally declaring the author's own position.4 Instead a variety of interlocutors ask questions, investigate philosophical problems, and puzzle over solutions while Plato remains noticeably silent. This silence of Plato indicates that he did not regard the unequivocal presentation of his own views to be of paramount importance. If this had been his aim, Plato had only to write a dialogue which included himselfas one ofthe characters clearly stating his own position. Having engaged in many philosophical discussions with Socrates and with his own students, Plato could have written a dialogue based on such conversations. His not doing so is sufficient to show that he did not use his writings as a primary vehicle for transmitting his own position in his own words. Nor did Plato use... (shrink)

In this book, William H. F. Altman argues that it is not order of composition but reading order that makes Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo “late dialogues,” and shows why Plato’s decision to interpolate the notoriously “late” Sophist and Statesman between Euthyphro and Apology deserves more respect from interpreters.

Plato's Cretan City is a thorough investigation into the roots of Plato's Laws and a compelling explication of his ideas on legislation and social institutions. A dialogue among three travelers, the Laws proposes a detailed plan for administering a new colony on the island of Crete. In examining this dialogue, Glenn Morrow describes the contemporary Greek institutions in Athens, Crete, and Sparta on which Plato based his model city, and explores the philosopher's proposed regulations concerning property, the family, government, and (...) the administration of justice, education, and religion. He approaches the Laws as both a living document of reform and a philosophical inquiry into humankind's highest earthly duty. (shrink)

Se busca rastrear la imagen que Platón tiene de Heráclito y articularla con la estructura argumentativa del Cratilo, para comprender las necesidades textuales a las que responde la doctrina del flujo perpetuo, es decir, la discusión sobre la corrección (ὀρθότης) del nombre. Gracias a la inclusión del testimonio heraclíteo, resulta posible rastrear la presunta consolidación de la tesis sobre los nombres primarios y los secundarios como el eje de la separación entre dos planos de realidad (uno estable y uno móvil) (...) y de la teoría de las Ideas -es decir, como la base de la epistemología platónica presente en los diálogos de madurez-. The article seeks to trace the image Plato has of Heraclitus and connect it with the argumentative structure of the Cratylus in order to understand the textual needs that give rise to the doctrine of perpetual flux, that is, the discussion regarding the correctness (ὀρθότης) of names. The inclusion of Heraclitus's testimony makes it possible to trace the alleged consolidation of the thesis regarding primary and secondary names as the axis of separation between two levels of reality (one stable, the other, changing) and the theory of Ideas -that is, as the basis of Plato's epistemology as set forth in the late dialogues-. (shrink)

Plato’s method of hypothesis is initiated in the Meno, is featured in the Phaedo and the Republic, and is further developed in the Theaetetus. His method of collection and division is mentioned in the Republic, is featured in the Phaedrus,and is elaborated with modifications in the Sophist and the Statesman. Both methods aim at definitions in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. In the course of these developments, the former method is shown to be weak in its treatment of (...) sufficient conditions, and the latter is shown to be comparably weak in its treatment of necessary conditions. A third method, which avoids these difficulties, is introduced in the first part of the Parmenides and is applied in connection with the eight hypotheses that follow. This application yields a demonstration of serious shortcomings both in historical Eleaticism and in the Eleatically-inspired theory of Forms in the Phaedo and the Republic, along with a demonstration of comparative strengths in historical Pythagoreanism and in the Pythagorean- inspiried theory of Forms in the Statesman and the Philebus. (shrink)

A reply to Melissa Lane's "Antianarchia: interpreting political thought in Plato" In these comments I focus on how to think of antianarchia as an element of Plato's political thought, and in doing so raise some methodological questions about how to read Plato’s dialogues, focusing on what is involved in attributing views to Plato in general.

The present study aims at giving factual support to the thesis that the Parmenides is serious in intention, rigorous in logical demonstration, and stylistically meticulous in its original composition. While this consideration may be tedious, still it is useful. Against a past history which has claimed to find the tone hilarious, the logic fallacious, the work inauthentic, the text in need of bracketing by divination, the whole incoherent— against these eccentricities a certain firm sobriety seems called for. I hope that (...) my conclusions find support and persist through fluctuations of philosophic and philological styles.The main difficulty with my thesis is that the text as we now have it (in Burnet's and Dies' editions) shows exceptions to every rule that might apply to style and even to logical structure. Thus it is almost but not quite uniformly true that each theorem opens with a theorem statement; that each is marked by a "questioning" response; that each deduction is valid when formalized in propositional calculus; and so on. Are the exceptions the result of careless composition; are they deliberate warnings not to take the proofs too seriously; or are they the result of errors in transmission? One way to test this is to reconstruct early versions of the text: if these show more logical rigor than the later versions the notion of a wholly valid original is supported; if they do not, the result may point toward the need for a less serious interpretation. A second thing to look for is the possibility that, here and there, parts of a coherent original text are uniquely conserved in sources other than the principal mss, B,T, and W. This assumes, of course, that the "original" text in question is the one with the best logical form, and that assumption seems justified. As a matter of fact, later copyings almost universally show deterioration, not improvement in style and logic.My textual findings are more compatible with some lines of interpretation than with others. Thus I offer some reasons for not accepting treatments of the work as a joke, mystical revelation, or abrupt metaphysical revision. The structure of the dialogue is best explained, I think, by reading it as an indirect proof that some non-Platonic interpretations of the theory of forms are unsatisfactory. In particular, these are the Megarian version (represented in the first part of the dialogue by Zeno, in the second by the First Hypothesis), and the Anaxagorean version put forward by Eudoxus (represented in the first part by Cephalus and his friends from Clazomenae, in the second by the Second Hypothesis). At the same time, the dialogue shows the need for a philosophic method other than the "hypothetical— deductive" way of dianoia; presumably this other method is the "dialectic" discussed in Republic VII. It also follows that any interpretation of the Phaedo which falls into either the Eudoxian or Megarian difficulties was not— at least at the date of the Parmenides—Plato's intended reading.Findings concerning the relations and reliability of the manuscripts of this dialogue also apply to the texts of the other Platonic dialogues which these mss contain.Further, the Parmenides is such an important work both historically and intrinsically that any insight which textual study can bring to its interpretation is a contribution to Western philosophy. (shrink)

Plato's Forms: Varieties of Interpretation is an ambitious work that brings together, in a single volume, widely divergent approaches to the topic of the Forms in Plato's dialogues.

This book attempts to bridge the gulf that still exists between 'literary' and 'philosophical' interpreters of Plato by looking at his use of characterization. Characterization is intrinsic to dramatic form and a concern with human character in an ethical sense pervades the dialogues on the discursive level. Form and content are further reciprocally related through Plato's discursive preoccupation with literary characterization. Two opening chapters examine the methodological issues involved in reading Plato 'as drama' and a set of questions surrounding (...) Greek 'character' words, including ancient Greek views about the influence of dramatic character on an audience. The figure of Sokrates qua Platonic 'hero' also receives preliminary discussion. The remaining chapters offer close readings of select dialogues, chosen to show the wide range of ways in which Plato uses his characters, with special emphasis on the kaleidoscopic figure of Sokrates and on Plato's own relationship to his 'dramatic' hero. (shrink)

This work is the first to demonstrate the differences and similarities between Plato's myths and the traditional kind of which he was critical. It also actively demonstrates the extent to which his own myths support or undermine the philosophical ideas of the dialogues in which they are set. It offers new arguments and criticism on point of detail concerning modern interpretations.

Cet ouvrage, composé de huit chapitres et de neuf appendices (qui contiennent des précisions utiles sur la méthode proposée), présente une thèse originale et controversée selon laquelle une structure musicale sous-tend les dialogues platoniciens, et en permet une plus riche compréhension. J. B. Kennedy s'appuie sur deux dialogues, le Banquet et l'Euthyphron pour la démontrer. Avant d'introduire sa méthodologie, il prend soin de tracer l'origine de ce type d'interprétation pour en défendre la pertinence. (…) - 12. Plato 12 (...) (2012). (shrink)

Plato wrote dialogues. While there has been attention to the dramatic elements of Plato's dialogues by a number of scholars, there has been much less attention to the narrative style of the dialogues. I argue that we should consider whether the dialogues are recited or presented like dramatic works with each character speaking his own words—or as a mixture of these narrative forms. By employing this interpretive tool to read the Republic, I illustrate how paying attention (...) to the narrative style enables us to see a democratic Socrates who undermines readings of the Republic famously offered by Karl Popper and Leo Strauss. Plato appears then as neither a defender of the "closed society" nor an advocate of the elite rule of the wise over the many. (shrink)