Plato's Dialectic at Play: Argument, Structure, and Myth in - download pdf or read online

By Kevin Corrigan

ISBN-10: 027102271X

ISBN-13: 9780271022710

ISBN-10: 0271024623

ISBN-13: 9780271024622

The Symposium is one among Plato’s so much available dialogues, an engrossing old record in addition to an wonderful literary masterpiece. through uncovering the structural layout of the discussion, Plato’s Dialectic at Play aims at revealing a Plato for whom the dialogical shape was once now not simply ornamentation or philosophical method however the essence of philosophical exploration. His dialectic is not just argument; it's also play.

Careful research of every layer of the textual content leads cumulatively to an image of the dialogue’s underlying constitution, concerning either argument and delusion, and exhibits dynamic hyperlink exists among Diotima’s larger mysteries and the association of the discussion as a complete. in this foundation the authors argue that the Symposium, with its optimistic idea of paintings inside the ascent to the attractive, might be seen as a spouse piece to the Republic, with its damaging critique of the function of paintings within the context of the great. Following Nietzsche’s recommendation and utilising standards constructed by way of Mikhail Bakhtin, they extra argue for seeing the Symposium because the first novel.

The ebook concludes with a entire reevaluation of the importance of the Symposium and its position in Plato’s idea more often than not, concerning significant matters in Platonic scholarship: the character of paintings, the body-soul connection, the matter of id, the connection among mythos and symbols, Platonic love, and the query of authorial writing and the vanishing signature of the absent Plato himself.

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Extra info for Plato's Dialectic at Play: Argument, Structure, and Myth in the Symposium

Sample text

I leave Socrates out of account; he’s actually sufficient either way” (176b–c). There are, as it were, two sides to Agathon, and this drinking intemperance is, so to speak, the shadow, unstated side. The other side befits, in an interesting way, Plato’s outrageously open pun on his name, “good”: overflowing generosity and complete freedom. When Aristodemus comes uninvited, Agathon is generous hospitality itself, and his reversal of the master-servant role is, in its way, a striking affirmation of the spontaneous liberality of his “goodness,” even if it tacitly points to the absence of an authentic, or good, principle of order, as we have suggested: “You slaves, serve dinner to the rest of us.

13. Cf. Rep. 573b–e. qxp 11/8/2004 3:53 PM Aristodemus’s Prologue Page 29 29 and the violence or enthusiasm of creativity? 14 And even more important still, how do these compare with the relationship between the tyrant and the adoring crowd? These questions are born out of the juxtaposition of these different dialogues and are foregrounded by Socrates’ playful employment of the term hybris in his conversation with an adoring disciple. The awakened political echoes, however, cannot be evaluated without some clear sense of how we are to examine the growing questions of the text, that is, questions contained and implicit but not fully containable within the mimetic levels of the text.

By contrast with the fundamental assumption of so-called mimetic poetry, there is in this narrative no original material form of the proverb. Even if it is to be recovered from the implied context of everyday speech, that initial form has already been punctured by an all-pervasive, destructive Homer, so that Homer and not the proverb is quoted by Socrates. What is left, then, in place of the unrecoverable original is the destruction and transformation of forms by language in conversation. The door leading back into some supposed foundational bedrock for “reality” or “language” is already closed, and we are literally compelled to look forward into the conversation between uneasy equals.

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