The Symposium addresses the relation between desire, beauty and the good life, while indicating the fascination that strong teaching arouses in followers. For Plato, unlike for moderns, power, desire and ethics are interrelated. This article takes Socrates as a case study for the Platonic understanding of this interrelation and it will put into play the grounds involved in their modern separation. It focuses on the three speakers in the dialogue who were followers of Socrates as a way of addressing the (...) role of desire in the teacher–student relation. The article demonstrates how the radical interpretive method brings to life the challenges a strong engagement with Eros risks, especially those related to Socrates’ strong and influential teaching, while addressing and exemplifying theorizing’s need for ironic intoxication. (shrink)

In the Crito, a dialogue that is highly influential for the traditions both of philosophy and of political thinking, Socrates resists the pleading of his friend Crito to escape the city that has condemned him. For Arendt, the dialogue instantiates the separation between humans as thinking beings and humans as acting beings, and so between political theory and philosophy. For others, the dialogue shows Socrates’ reasoning to be self-contradictory. Socrates’ introduction of the Athenian Laws as a world of greater moral (...) force than the empirical Athens of Crito’s appeal aims to ground principled action. Yet, there are many competing principles (authoritarianism, obedience, patriotism, friendship, integrity) that, interpretively speaking, have been understood as validated by this dialogue. Is there any necessary or analytic principle that can be articulated and, if so, what are the grounds of such? Drawing on the theory and methods of Blum and McHugh’s analysis and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, this article seeks to demonstrate that practical (political) action needs to be understood in an analytic context to grasp fully its ethical and political implications. Along the way, reference will be made to Garfinkel’s articulation of members’ methods for discovering agreements and Arendt’s articulation of the common world that the conversation among friends sustains. (shrink)

This paper takes the passing of Peter McHugh as an occasion to examine the intellectual development of his work. The paper is mainly focused on the product of his collaboration with his colleague and friend, Alan Blum. As such, it addresses the tradition of social inquiry, Analysis, which they cofounded. It traces the influence of Harold Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology on McHugh and on the beginning of Analysis. The collaboration with Blum is examined through a variety of coauthored works but most especially (...) in the two books On the Beginning of Social Inquiry (1974) and Self Reflection in the Arts and Sciences (1984). It also examines the relation of his independent writing before 1974, and since 1984 to the expression of the tradition of inquiry as exemplified in those two texts. The paper builds on some interview material with Peter McHugh and reflects on the influence of Peter the teacher as well as the theorist McHugh. Most especially, through its engagement with this material, it seeks to exemplify the dialectic and living nature of the program called Analysis. (shrink)