A passage in Plato’s Laws (719c) offers a fresh look at Plato’s theory of poetry and art. Only here does Plato call poetry both mimêsis “imitation, representation,” and the product of enthousiasmos “inspiration, possession.” The Republic and Sophist examine poetic imitation; the Ion and Phaedrus (with passages in Apology and Meno) develop a theory of artistic inspiration; but Plato does not confront the two descriptions together outside this paragraph. After all, mimêsis fuels an attack on poetry, while enthousiasmos is sometimes (...) used to attack it, sometimes to praise it. The explanation evidently lies in Plato’s understanding of drama, which in the Laws has grown more precise, from simply the presentation of characters to the presentation of multiple characters engaged in dramatic conflict. (shrink)

Plato’s most infamous discussions of poetry in the Republic, in which he both develops original distinctions in narratology and advocates some form of censorship, raises numerous philosophical and philological questions. Foremost among them, perhaps, is the puzzle of why he returns to poetry in Book X after having dealt with it thoroughly in Books II–III, particularly because his accounts of the “mimetic” aspect of poetry are, on their face, quite different. How are we to understand this double treatment? Here I (...) will focus on a single aspect of this question, the compatibility of the notion of μίμησις and its cognates in the two books. As Nickolas Pappas has said, “Whether Books 3 and 10 offer compatible accounts of mimêsis, and how one might make them compatible, remains the most controversial question about Plato’s aesthetics”.2 I will show that there is a single notion of μίμησις operative throughout, namely that of representation by resemblance. I will take an unusual tack. I will not begin with the most problematic part of Book III for this interpretation about poetic, linguistic μίμησις, but with the later sections on musical μίμησις. Once we have an account of this, I claim, it is easier to see how narrative μίμησις is also a kind of representation by resemblance. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to determine the Platonic treatment of image. For this purpose, the most relevant sections of four dialogues Republic, Sophist, Cratyilus and Phaedo are analyzed. Textual examination has contributed to detect a distinction that operates in Platonic treatment, namely the difference between 'appearance' and 'image'. While the former is an ontologically loss-making illusion, the latter assumes the role of sensible instantiation of the ideal-intelligible realities. Based on this second kind, Plato has conceived the possibility (...) of an ideal mimesis and a comeback to the knowledge of forms. (shrink)