This dissertation is a study of appetite in Plato’s Timaeus, Republic and Phaedrus. In recent research is it often suggested that Plato considers appetite (i) to pertain to the essential needs of the body, (ii) to relate to a distinct set of objects, e.g. food or drink, and (iii) to cause behaviour aiming at sensory pleasure. Exploring how the notion of appetite, directly and indirectly, connects with Plato’s other purposes in these dialogues, this dissertation sets out to evaluate these ideas. (...) By asking, and answering, three philosophically and interpretatively crucial questions, individually linked to the arguments of the dialogues, this thesis aims to show (i) that the relationship between appetite and the body is not a matter of survival, and that appetite is better understood in terms of excess; (ii) that appetite is multiform and cannot be defined in terms of a distinct set of objects; and (iii) that appetite, in Plato, can also pertain to non-sensory objects, such as articulated discourse. -/- Chapter one asks what the universe can teach us about embodied life. It argues that Plato, in the Timaeus, works with an important link between the universe and the soul, and that the account of disorder, irrationality and multiformity identifying a pre-cosmic condition of the universe provides a key to understanding the excessive behaviour and condition of a soul dominated by appetite. -/- Chapter two asks why the philosophers of the Republic’s Kallipolis return to the cave, and suggests that Plato’s notion of the noble lie provides a reasonable account of this. By exploring the Republic’s ideas of education, poetry and tradition, it argues that appetite – a multiform and appearance oriented source of motivation – is an essential part of this account. -/- Chapter three asks why Socrates characterizes the speeches of the Phaedrus as deceptive games. It proposes that this question should be understood in the light of two distinctions: one between playful and serious discourse and one between simple and multiform. It argues that the speeches of the Phaedrus are multiform games, and suggests that appetite is the primary source of motivation of the soul addressed, personified by Phaedrus. -/- . (shrink)

Josh Wilburn examines the relationship between Plato's views on psychology and his political philosophy. Focusing on his reflections on the spirited part of the tripartite soul, or thumos, and spirited motivation, he explores the social and political challenges that occupy Plato throughout his works.

This chapter presents several of the dominant ideas and intellectual debates about human beauty from archaic Greece to early Christianity. At issue are ideals of character, ethical ideals of who one should be and how one should live. What constitutes beauty and why beauty matters change alongside conceptions of body and soul, virtue and happiness, and the relationship between human beings and the divine.

With the use of a particular metaphor, which appears at the end of the Cratylus and is taken up with perfect symmetry at the beginning of the Theaetetus, Plato certainly wanted to indicate the succession of Cratylus–Theaetetus as an order for reading the two dialogues, which Trasillus faithfully reproduced in structuring the second tetralogy of Platonic dialogues. The claim of the theory of ideas, with which the Cratylus ends, must therefore be considered the background in which to place not only (...) the analysis of the name carried out in the Cratylus, but also the discussion and criticism of the epistemological theories examined and refuted in the Theaetetus. The transition from the discussion of the name to that of the logos is another important theoretical element that connects the two dialogues. Another one is the theory of knowledge, already precisely elaborated in the Cratylus, and taken up and deepened in the Theaetetus. Finally, the theme of false and error is a third theoretical element common to the two dialogues, which, starting from Euthydemus, finds its solution in the Sophist. (shrink)

In the opening of Plato’s Lysis, Socrates criticizes the love-besotted Hippothales’ way of speaking to, and about, Hippothales’ yearned-for Lysis. Socrates subsequently proceeds to demonstrate (ἐπιδεῖξαι) how Hippothales should converse with Lysis (206c5–6). But how should we assess Socrates’ criticisms of, and demonstration to, Hippothales? Are they defensible by Socrates’ own standards, as well as independent criteria? In this note, I first articulate and assess Socrates’ criticisms of Hippothales. Second, I identify, examine, and respond to puzzles to which Socrates’ demonstration (...) to Hippothales gives rise. (shrink)

Abstract What sense are we to make of the promise of love against the contingency of human life? I discuss two replies to this question: (1) the suggestion that marriage, based on the probable success of this kind of relationship, is a more or less worthwhile endeavour (cf. Moller and Landau), and (2) Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian proposal that we only live life fully if we embrace aspects of life, such as loving relationships, that are vulnerable to fortune. I show that (...) both responses, in different ways, depend on the presupposition that the sense of our promises to love is dependent on our ability to make predictions. The philosophers I discuss assume an epistemological standpoint from which we may attempt to judge whether it is in our general interest to love. I argue that embracing such a perspective by itself leads our attention away from the kind of personal and moral engagement in other people of which our promises to love are expressive. From the perspective of love, the attempt to calculate the risks and gains of loving itself appears as a moral failure to be present to the reality of other people. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 1 - 39 Through a novel set of texts drawn from Plato, Porphyry, Plotinus, Ps. Julian, Proclus, Hermeias, Synesius and Damascius, I explore how anagogic _erōs_ in master-disciple relationships in Neoplatonism contributed to the attainment of self-knowledge and to the transmission of knowledge, authority and inspired insights within and outside the _diadochia_. I view anagogic _erōs_ as one of the most important channels of non-discursive pedagogy and argue for the mediating power of anagogic (...) _erōs_ in the attainment of the main goal of the Platonist: reorienting desire from sensible to intelligible beauty and changing one’s ontological status to become like god and attain union with the divine. After considering the problematic nature of Socratic _erōs_, its skeptics and detractors, I discuss the dynamics of philosopher-disciple relationships and the experience of anagogic _erōs_ in the following: the attack on Porphyry and defense by Plotinus following Porphyry’s recital of an ecstatic poem on _Hieros Gamos_, the concealment of anagogic _erōs_ behind the authoritative façade of an oracle, the intensely devotional private letters of Ps. Julian to the aged Iamblichus and of Synesius to his female master Hypatia; the identification of anagogic _erōs_ with theurgic ascent in Syrianus’s school according to Proclus and Hermeias and the experiences of anagogic _erōs_ outside the _diadochia_ in Damascius’ _Philosophical History_. I conclude that the true and correct practice of philosophy had much, if not everything to do with the anagogic _erōs_ between the true philosopher, the bacchant and the philosopher in training, aspiring to become transformed from thyrsus-bearer into bacchant. The privileged and exalted status given to the divine lover ensured the transmission of the philosophical tradition in all its richness, preserving both its discursive and non-discursive aspects as a system of thought, as a way of life and as a way of being and loving. (shrink)

This thesis examines the Platonic brand in utopian fiction. It looks at Plato's dialogues, H. G Wells' A Modern Utopia and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The modern texts provide opportunities to observe the effects of ideas found in the dialogues, helping illustrate their implications for the Platonic utopia. Understanding the implications of Plato's textual criticism found in his dialogues is indispensable in understanding how his dialogues are to be understood and what may be understood to be his utopia. This (...) thesis is divided into four chapters; the first two chapters are further divided into sub-headings to assist with navigation of the argument. The first chapter isolates meaning from vocabulary and sets out Socrates' understanding of the relationship between the two entities. The second chapter proceeds to set out Socrates understanding of the hermeneutic effect on the interplay of his dialectic and interlocutors. The third chapter sets out how Socrates seeks to mitigate the distortion of articulated ideas. The fourth chapter concludes the argument stating that Plato's dialogues can only be understood as a unity, that his utopia cannot have a finality, instead it is fluid, free, continuing, Socratic, dialectic. (shrink)

Abstract Scholarship on the Symposium is dominated by a debate on interpersonal love started by Gregory Vlastos in his article, `The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato.' This paper argues that this debate is a misguided one, because it is not reflective of the central concerns of this text. Attention needs to be turned to the broader ethical questions posed about the ends of life, the nature of human happiness, and contemplation. Failure to do so will mean that (...) the Symposium continues to be eclipsed as a key resource in central debates in Platonic ethics. (shrink)

In Plato's Philebus the last section of the discussion on the falseness of pleasure is dedicated to those pleasures intrinsically mixed with pain. This paper focuses specifically on bodily mixed pleasures, an analysis that extends from 44d to 47c, while its focal point is 46-47c. By adopting the anti-hedonists' methodology, Socrates cunningly transforms his entire analysis of bodily mixed pleasures into a discourse on human disease, in which medical terminology prevails. Two major points are made in the reading suggested here. (...) Despite Socrates' quasi-medical language, a substratum of poetic discourse is underlying his analysis. Thus, a network of poetic associations—probably promptly recalled by Plato's audience—not only reveals the intertextual encounter between medical, philosophic and poetic discourses but also contributes to the interpretation of Socrates' analysis. Hence, the pathology of love as expressed through poetry illuminates the meaning, questionable in straightforward medical terms, of passage 46c6-d2, while it also reveals the unfolding unity underlying Socrates' analysis, otherwise thought to comprise three distinct medical cases. Ancient medical lore is important for the understanding of passage 46d7-47a1 on the affliction of knêsis and psôra, not only because it confirms the analogy between the physiology of knêsis and that of sexual arousal and climax, but also because it illuminates the specific medical treatment Socrates is describing. Thus, in the crucial debate about whether Plato uses the term aporiais or pyriais in 46e2, medical evidence seems to support the latter. The reading pyriais makes this complicated paragraph more comprehensible in terms of meaning and syntax, while stressing the importance of heat in the processes of both the curing of knêsis and of human orgasm. Besides, it further confirms the intertextual encounter between the Phaedrus and the Philebus. (shrink)

Seit Dodds’ Anwendung des Begriffs „Schamkultur“ auf die griechische Kultur genießt das Thema Scham die besondere Aufmerksamkeit der Gräzisten. Basierend auf einer detaillierten Analyse der relevanten Belegstellen im gesamten platonischen Corpus und einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit den vorherigen einschlägigen Forschungen, versucht die vorliegende Arbeit Platons Konzeption der Scham systematisch zu erläutern, und zwar thematisch unter den folgenden vier Perspektiven: dem sokratischen elenchos, der Wahrheitsliebe, dem Moralverständnis sowie der Moralerziehung im Staat. Die Studie zielt einerseits darauf ab, aufzuzeigen, dass Platons Verständnis (...) von Scham nicht so unreif ist, wie man bislang dachte; andererseits möchte sie vor Augen führen, dass Platon Scham nicht, wie traditionell angenommen, als nur negativ erachtet, sondern ihre positive Rolle in verschiedenen Gebieten durchaus anerkennt. Es wird gezeigt, dass Scham und die ihr verwandten Emotionen von Bedeutung sowohl für den platonischen Sokrates als auch für die platonische Philosophie im Ganzen sind, auch wenn der Begriff „Schamkultur“ wohl keine zutreffende Bezeichnung für seine Zeit darstellt. (shrink)

It is often held that Plato did not have a viable account of interpersonal love. The account of eros—roughly, desire—in the Symposium appears to fail, and, though the Lysis contains much suggestive material for an account of philia—roughly, friendship—this is an aporetic dialogue, which fails, ultimately, to provide an account of friendship. This paper argues that Plato's account of friendship is in the Phaedrus. This dialogue outlines three kinds of philia relationship, the highest of which compares favourably to the Aristotelian (...) notion of love for another ‘for their own sake’. In contrast to the account of eros in the Symposium, this gives Plato an account of interpersonal love that meets some of the requirements laid down by Gregory Vlastos for a satisfactory account of interpersonal love. (shrink)

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)

At the beginning of the "Phaedrus", Socrates distinguishes between two kinds of people: those who are more complex, violent and hybristic than the monster Typhon, and those who are simpler, calmer and tamer (230a). I argue that there are also two distinct types of Eros (Love) that correlate to Socrates’s two kinds of people. In the first case, lovers cannot attain recollection because their souls are disordered in the absence of self-knowledge. For the latter, the self-knowledge of self-disciplined lovers renders (...) them capable of recollecting the Forms by ordering their souls naturally. (shrink)

The gaps, fissures, and lapses of attention in a life—what I call “ordinary oblivions”—are fertile fragilities that present a compelling source for ethics. Plato, not Aristotle, is the ancient philosopher specially poised to speak to this feature of human life. Drawing upon poet C. K. Williams's idea that forgetting is a “looking away” that makes possible “beginning again,” I present a Platonic approach to ethics as an alternative to Aristotelian or virtue ethics. Plato's Phaedrus is a key source text for (...) this alternate picture; from it I suggest how we might construe Iris Murdoch's “task of seeing” in terms of the engagement with written form. Poetry is a central locale for such engagement, and thus suggests a kind of ethical praxis that arises from the theoretical emphases of my examination of forgetting, the unmoored self, remade other-regard, and sacred sources. (shrink)

En este artículo me propongo mostrar que lo que Sócrates hace con Fedro a lo largo de toda la obra no es otra cosa que utilizar la auténtica retórica que es descrita en la segunda parte del diálogo. Las tensiones, rivalidades y celos de la situación inicial entre ellos expone un perfil representativo de relaciones entre interlocutores con perspectivas intelectuales opuestas. Es preciso disolver la resistencia emocional por medio de una serie de pasos graduales, estratégicos, y ‘engañosos’. Hay que partir (...) de acuerdos, siquiera parciales, para continuar dialogando. Sin embargo, Sócrates también introduce nociones nuevas acerca del amor, pero éstas pasan desapercibidas a un Fedro obsesionado con la imitación de su enamorado Lisias. Hasta que Sócrates decide cortar el juego y cruzar el río. Este corte provoca un giro en ambos personajes: Fedro se dispone a escuchar lo que Sócrates quiere contarle y Sócrates se revela ante sí mismo como un personaje capaz de ‘encantar’ a Fedro con la belleza rapsódica del relato y superar su propio temor de convertirse en una bestia devoradora. Al final Sócrates muestra su juego a Fedro y le enseña cómo ha sido posible llegar a un auténtico diálogo filosófico, donde pueda tener lugar la enseñanza y el aprendizaje recíprocos. (shrink)

By elaborating upon pivotal twentieth-century studies in language, representation, and subjectivity, Being Made Strange reorients the study of rhetoric according to the discursive formation of subjectivity. The author develops a theory of how rhetorical practices establish social, political, and ethical relations between self and other, individual and collectivity, good and evil, and past and present. He produces a novel methodology that analyzes not only what an individual says, but also the social, political, and ethical conditions that enable him or her (...) to do so. This book also offers valuable ethical and political insights for the study of subjectivity in philosophy, cultural studies, and critical theory. (shrink)

Platón procura establecer en el Fedro una estrecha vinculación entre la poesía y el ámbito eidético propio del saber filosófico, o al que accede el filósofo mediante una ejercitada captación sinóptico-dialéctica. Tal tipo de poesía filosófica aparece ilustrada a la perfección en la propia palinodia socrática, la cual erige a Sócrates – y en última instancia a Platón – como paradigma de filósofo poeta, palinodia que ha sido obligada a pronunciarse “con ciertos términos poéticos”. Partiendo de esa palinodia como modelo, (...) Platón se propone abordar el tema del éros con discursos filosóficos que se nutran de términos poéticos, o sea, a través de una explícita mixtura de elementos filosóficos y poéticos, cuyo ejemplo más claro es el Fedro en su conjunto, o, en términos más generales, el género dialógico platónico en tanto este pone en escena una interacción entre los registros filosófico y poético. Teniendo en cuenta esta relación de compatibilidad que Platón establece en el Fedro entre su paradigma poético-filosófico y el de tipo tradicional – paradigmas que en los libros II, III y X de la República aparecían claramente en tensión –, en este artículo me interesa apoyar tal relación en la anécdota del sueño relatada por Sócrates al comienzo del Fedón, en la cual el filósofo confiesa ante Simmias y Cebes haber compuesto desde su encierro en la cárcel – ya que anteriormente jamás lo había hecho – poemas basados en la versificación o musicalización de las fábulas de Esopo y un himno a Apolo. (shrink)