How can stories contribute to ethical education, when they reach people who have already been shaped by many stories, including ethically problematic ones? This question is pursued here by considering Plato’s allegory of the cave, focusing on a reading of it offered by Jonathan Lear. Lear claims that the cave allegory aims to undermine its audience’s inheritance of stories. I question the possibility and desirability of that project, especially in relation to ethical education. Some works of contemporary fiction by Jenny (...) Erpenbeck and J. M. Coetzee are discussed as stories that use more complex strategies for ethically constructive engagement with story-saturated audiences. (shrink)

Current interpretations of Plato’s cave are obviously incorrect because they do not explain how what we hear does not come from what we see. I argue that Plato is saying that the colors we receive from our faculty of vision do not cause the sounds that we receive from our faculty of hearing. I also show how we do not see ourselves or one other, how the shadows on the wall of the cave are images of that which casts them (...) and therefore have less reality than them, and how the cave illustrates the divided line’s concern for the relationship between Forms and visible reality. The paper is structured around the two great riddles of the divided line: how Forms can be more real than everyday objects, and how one can know the unhypothesized beginning with complete certainty. I further argue that the puppets that cast shadows stand for the immanent Forms of the Phaedo and also for the moving Forms of the Timaeus. That of which these puppets are themselves images would thus stand for the Forms as they are in themselves of the Phaedo or the indestructible Forms of the Timaeus. ‘Plato used to ask whether the discussion was proceeding from or leading up to fundamental principles, just as in a race course there is a difference between running from the judges to the far end of the track and running back again.’ – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1095. (shrink)

No Íon, a autoridade e a sabedoria de poetas e rapsodos são confrontadas por meios indiretos. O caráter oblíquo dessa estratégia impede o acesso direto ao conteúdo do diálogo e provoca inúmeros equívocos de leitura. Um fato contextual estimula mais ainda leituras equivocadas. A poesia tratada no Íon difere muito da forma como nós, modernos, a entendemos. Na Antiguidade grega, de base aural, a poesia era o modo privilegiado de conservação da tradição herdada, e permaneceu exercendo essa função capital até (...) mesmo quando a escrita passou a desempenhar papel relevante na forma de composição e transmissão cultural. Neste contexto, o rapsodo representa uma autoridade que cobre praticamente todos os campos do saber. Autoridade enciclopédica, contra a qual Platão travou uma guerra não sem ambiguidades. O presente artigo busca revelar a motivação profunda que anima o Íon: a contraposição entre dois modos de comunicação, o da poesia e o da filosofia. Defende, ainda, que Platão, ao atacar a performance poética, busca, além de rejeitá-la, substituí-la pelo élenkhos socrático como modo de comunicação ideal para instrução e guia da vida humana. (shrink)

Este texto pretende desenvolver a tese de que o principal interlocutor de Sócrates em A República, Glauco, irmão de Platão, revela qualidades semelhantes àquelas que serão exigidas dos guardiões e do futuro filósofo e governante da cidade construída na argumentação de Sócrates e seus interlocutores. Procura-se mostrar que isso pode ser encontrado em diversos momentos do diálogo. Pretende-se também extrair algumas consequências para a própria compreensão desse diálogo e da filosofia platônica como um todo.

This introduction presents an overview of Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought and its central arguments. I situate the contributions of the book within theoretical work on political myth, both traditional and more recent, and also within scholarship on the philosophical function of Plato’s myths. Whereas political theorists have long conceived of myth in pathological terms, Plato and the Mythic Tradition joins a growing body of work envisioning a more constructive role for myth in politics and philosophy. This (...) was a task that preoccupied Plato and some of his most significant modern readers. Recovering their common project, moreover, helps us tell a different story about Plato’s philosophical myths and their reception in modern political thought. (shrink)

In the vicinity of the work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be.In “the age of commemoration” (Stone 2010), it is ironic that we have developed such an affective immunity to the commemorative artifacts that fill our cities. In downtown Washington, Boston, or Philadelphia, many pedestrians stroll past a dozen or more memorials in a single afternoon, usually failing to pay much attention to the specific historical calling they make. Outside the ritualistic and consumptive settings where (...) tourists encounter a city’s most popular monuments, many artifacts of public memory simply blend into the mundane architectural atmosphere that surrounds them. As John Berger has pointed out, works of art—and .. (shrink)

This essay utilizes Plato's insights into the role of shame in dialogical interactions to illuminate the aesthetic dimensions of deliberative democracy. Through a close analysis of the refutation of Polus in Plato's dialogue, the "Gorgias", I show how the emotion of shame is central to the unsettling, dynamic, and transformative character of democratic engagement and political judgment identified by recent aesthetic critics of Habermas' model of communicative action and democratic deliberation. Plato's analysis of shame offers a friendly amendment to these (...) aesthetic critiques by showing how the psychological forces at the heart of shame make the outcome of our political engagements with others uncertain and unsettling, even while they make possible the kind of self-reflexivity necessary to foster the deliberative virtue of sincerity or truthfulness. (shrink)