L’authenticité de l’Alcibiade majeur est depuis le xixe siècle souvent remise en cause; on y voit notamment un mélange incongru de socratisme et de platonisme. Inséparable du débat sur l’authenticité du dialogue, l’étude du passage clé sur la connaissance de soi est confrontée à deux interprétations opposées, habituellement estimées irréconciliables, soit les lectures théocentrique et anthropocentrique. Le commentaire d’Olympiodore a le mérite d’unir habilement, à la lumière du contexte dramatique, les dimensions «érotique» et «démonique» des activités pédagogiques de Socrate et (...) par là de concilier ces deux lectures. (shrink)

A new translation and edition of Aristotle's Protrepticus (with critical comments on the fragments) -/- Welcome -/- The Protrepticus was an early work of Aristotle, written while he was still a member of Plato's Academy, but it soon became one of the most famous works in the whole history of philosophy. Unfortunately it was not directly copied in the middle ages and so did not survive in its own manuscript tradition. But substantial fragments of it have been preserved in several (...) works by Iamblichus of Chalcis, a third century A.D. neo-Pythagorean philosopher and educator. On the basis of a close study of Iamblichus' extensive use and excerption of Aristotle's Protrepticus, it is possible to reconstruct the backbone of the lost work, and then to flesh it out with the other surviving reports about the work from antiquity (for example in Alexander of Aphrodisias and other ancient commentators on Aristotle). It is also possible to identify several papyrus fragments of the work, and many references and literary allusions in later authors, especially Cicero, whose own lost dialogue Hortensius was a defense of philosophy modeleld on Aristotle's. (shrink)