Platonic Dialogues Research Articles

Whiteheadian Recollection

At the opening of the Platonic dialogue bearing his name, Meno asks Socrates whether virtue can be taught. The answer, it would seem, is "no": virtue comes only "as a gift from the gods" (99e). Because it is not an item of knowledge, there are no rules for acquiring virtue that a teacher can impart and a student learn. So those who possess virtue--and at least a few among the citizens of Athens are in fact virtuous--must have acquired it in some nonrational way, perhaps by genetic inheritance or dumb luck, but more likely by the intervention of transcendent benevolent powers.

Beyond the Comedy and Tragedy of Authority: The Invisible Father in Plato's Republic

What follows is a reading of Plato's Republic in the light of Aristophanes' Clouds. More precisely, what is here offered is the bare outline of such a readinga set of preliminary notes that, by illuminating the inceptive stages of the Republic (especially book 1), constitutes a propaedeutic to the interpretation of the Platonic dialogue as a whole. Questions that one would typically be expected to raise in this context, questions regarding the relation of philosophy to poetry, the nexus between the Aristophanean and the Platonic Socrates, or Aristophanes' comedy in connection with the fate of the historical Socrates, will here remain unaddressed or will be touched upon only marginally (and obliquely). Far from accidental, this qualified

The Search for the King: Reflexive Irony in Plato's Politicus

Platonic dialogues are self-concealing, presenting ideas by indirection or in riddling form, often exploring a difficulty or aporia without arriving at a solution. Since philosophers have begun to see Plato's work as imbued with irony, double meaning, and ambiguity, literary techniques that accommodate such layered meanings become a necessary adjunct to interpretation. The dialogue Politicus explores through an aporetic process a central Platonic concern, the relation between ideal and real. Close analysis of the important section dealing with law and constitutions reveals some of the complexity. By his wayward conduct of the argument, the Eleatic stranger repeatedly forces reevaluation of earlier arguments or conclusions. At the close of the cosmic myth (274e1-275c4), the Stranger warned against confusing the divine monarch, a true shepherd, with his mortal counterpart, the best ruler, whose discovery is the aim of the dialogue. The distinction that was made then is simple in context, but complex in view of the conclusion at 303b8-c5 that the participants in all governments except the ideal monarchy are supreme wizards and fakers. The truly real (ὄντως ὤν) statesman thus recedes into a distance remote from the world of practical politics, while the familiar regimes are marked as irretrievably flawed and inauthentic. The ability of the fake statesmen to deceive by impersonating the true king also means that it may be impossible to make the crucial distinction between king and tyrant, since either may disregard the laws. The strange fable of legalism run wild (300a) confirms the ludicrous and destructive results of rigid obedience to law, but concludes that rigidity is necessary to the false regimes. The corollary is that seekers after truth, like Socrates or even the Stranger himself, must always be rejected by law-based societies.

Alcibiades and Athens: a study in literary presentation

It is not the aim of this book to add to the extensive literature on Alcibiades' life and career. Instead the author focuses on the explosive mix of fear and fascination excited by Alcibiades in his contemporaries and in particular in key literary texts: Thucydides, the mysterious pseudo-Andocides 4, the encomium of Isocrates 16, the final scene of Plato's Symposium. The book is about the acute tension between the classical city and the individual of superlative power, status, and ambition. It looks at the way Alcibiades is approximated to archetypes of the individual 'outside' the city: the tyrant, the athletic victor, the ostracism victim, the scapegoat, the barbarian. Whereas modern discussions of ancient Athens and Athenian civic texts stress collective ideology, this study focuses on the opposing strand in tension with this dominant ideology: the fascination with the powerful individual. The book is thus at once a contribution to the study of civic ideology, and also to that of the individual and of the role of the individual in classical texts - rhetoric, the historiography of Thucydides, the Platonic dialogue. The book also considers the development of the post-classical depiction of Alcibiades, concluding with a study of Plutarch's reaction both to this tradition and to the classical texts.

Plato and Platonism

In this volume, a distinguished group of philosophers aims to offer fresh insight into Platonic studies. Combining research with analysis, the authors present 14 essays on various dimensions of Plato's thought. Most of Plato's dialogues are examined, from such Socratic texts as Protagoras, Euthyphro and Crito to the allegedly late Sophist, Statesman and Laws. Several essays explore specific philosophical problems raised in a single Platonic dialogue. Some offer in-depth analysis of one dialogue - for instance, the volume includes two very different but highly provocative essays on Timateus. Others pursue a topic or theme that runs throughout a number of dialogues, and others speak about the Platonic heritage and the thought of ancient philosophers who regarded themselves as faithfully preserving and transmitting the doctrines of their master. The major subject divisions of philosophy are covered, with considerable attention being paid to issues of Platonist methodology.

The Dancing Sokrates and the Laughing Xenophon, or the Other Symposium

The Dancing Sokrates and the Laughing Xenophon, or the Other Symposium Bernhard Huss Xenophon's Symposium is one of his minor Socratic works, and even though other opera Socratica Xenophontis, his Memorabilia and probably also his Oeconomicus, are much more famous, occasionally it has been called his best work.1 Nonetheless the Symposium has often been judged very negatively in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 If one looks closely at its Forschungsgeschichte, there can be no doubt about the origin of most of these critical statements: it has suffered from comparison with Plato's famous work of the same title. In 1972 Gallardo's report on recent research on Xenophon's Symposium had to state that little had changed since the days of Wilamowitz–Moellendorff: "El Banquete de Jenofonte, obra amena y de agradabilísima lectura, siempre, o casi siempre, es puesta, inevitablemente, en relación con su homónimo platónico, y a través de esta comparación se la suele juzgar."3 The vast majority of modern Platonists and Xenophontists tend to agree about the relative chronology of the two works. There is very little doubt that Plato wrote his Symposium first. It seems certain that Pla [End Page 381] to's was published between 385/84 and 378,4 and Xenophon very probably produced his only in the late 360s.5 The considerable number of parallels between the two6 proves that Xenophon knew Plato's Symposium. And not only did he know it—his own opusculum was strongly influenced by Plato's opus. Still, Plato's Symposium is not the only work Xenophon quotes and uses while constructing his story of the evening at Kallias' house: he is also influenced by Plato's Phaedrus and other Platonic dialogues as well as by other Socratics, namely Antisthenes and Aeschines. And one should not forget the well–known fact that Xenophon generally does not just quote other authors, but rearranges the elements he borrows from them according to his own needs in order to create largely independent new works of art which are neither Platonic nor Antisthenic but simply Xenophontic. Therefore Gallardo certainly is right: looking at Plato's Symposium while making statements about Xenophon's can be helpful, but "reconociendo, pues, lo razonable de esta actitud, nos parece sin embargo más justo estudiar la obra de Jenofonte por sí misma, prescindiendo, en principio, de cualesquiera otras consideraciones."7 My primary goal here is to promote a better understanding of both the peculiar intention and the literary technique of this underestimated work. For this purpose, let us first look at a particular passage of Xenophon's Symposium which has often been misunderstood by ancient and modern interpreters (and which is a good example of more [End Page 382] general misunderstandings concerning the work as a whole) and then attempt to draw a number of conclusions regarding the composition and meaning of this text. I The passage in question is Symp. 2.15–20. What is the context of this little scene? We are at a dinner party thrown by the rich Kallias in honor of his erōmenos Autolykos, victor in the pankration at the Panathenaea of 422 B.C. What is the background? After the victory of his beloved Autolykos, Kallias, accompanied by the boy and his father, Lykon, and one Nikeratos, encounters Sokrates and a number of his friends, namely Kritobulos, Hermogenes, Antisthenes, and Charmides. He invites them to his house. After some hesitation, the Socratics accept the invitation. They take their seats (or, better, their klinai) in Kallias' andrōn, impressed by the splendid beauty of the young Autolykos. While they are dining, they are joined by Philippos the jester (1.11–16) and later also by a Syracusan impresario and his little troupe of artists (2.1), which consists of two beautiful girls and a boy who, as it seems, does not yield too much to Autolykos as far as good looks go. The guests greatly enjoy their music, their dancing, and their artistic skills (3.1, 9.3–7), and Sokrates, throughout the symposium in a very relaxed and jovial mood, is the first to express this, praising both his...

Plato, Carneades, and Cicero's Philus (Cicero, Rep. 3.8–31)

The centrepiece of Cicero's De re publica is a discussion of justice (Book 3). This discussion, which evokes the theme of the Platonic dialogue after which it was named, consists of a set of three speeches. It begins with a speech opposing justice, placed in the mouth of L. Furius Philus and alleged by him to be modelled on the second of a pair of speeches for and against justice delivered in Rome in 155 B.C. by the Greek Academic philosopher Carneades (Rep. 3.8–31 [8–29 B]). Philus' speech lays the dialectical foundation for the two subsequent speeches, a defence of justice as the prerequisite for government by C. Laelius (Rep. 3.32–41 [30–41 B]), and an explanation of its role in various forms of government by Scipio Aemilianus (Rep. 3.42–8).

What Socrates said—and why Gorgias and Polus did not respond: A reading of Socrates’ definition of rhetoric in Gorgias 461–466

T his paper is an effort-which none of the characters in the dialogue maketo listen carefully to Socrates' most famous attack on rhetoric. This locus classicus is found in the Gorgias within the opening pages (461-466) of Socrates' conversation with Polus. In it he charges that rhetoric, Gorgias' skill, is a defective art and no more than base sucking up or flattery. He completes his condemnation by likening rhetoric, as Shakespeare's Faulconbridge does, a millennium and a half later, to sweet, sweet poison for the age's tooth, (King John, I, I), a debased confection in place of healthy food. It is not only characters in the dialogue who fail to make a searching inquiry into Socrates' condemnation. Many rhetors since that time, smarting from the sting of what Plato has Socrates say about rhetoric, have taken the passage as unproblematically expressing a blanket condemnation of rhetoric. But I believe it is not necessary to read Socrates' condemnation of rhetoric in that fashion, and I attempt a reading in which the condemnation is less absolute. In the interest of disclosure I should say that I undertake this analysis in an Aristotelian spirit. My interest in the passage began with Aristotle's allusion to it in the opening sentence of his Art of Rhetoric (1354a) and continues to be guided by what I believe Aristotle has to teach about rhetoric. It is also guided by a realization that Plato, a dramatic poet, achieves his effect, in dramas that have little overt action, almost entirely by rhetoric, that is, by the creation of a coherent voice through which we approach each character. Whatever Plato's ultimate understanding of the relation of wisdom and art (Roochnik), any argument that Plato has contempt for rhetoric must, sooner or later, deal with his constant and loving use of it in his work. The passage in question forms the first part-about a fifth of the bulk-of Socrates' dialogic encounter with Polus. This paper is thus limited to reflection on a fragmentary part of that encounter, for Socrates' condemnation of rhetoric emerges in four Stephanus pages. Nevertheless, it is a fragment that, like all of the pieces of a Platonic dialogue, spirals into place in the larger encounter and beyond that in the dialogue as a whole. I argue that our assessment of Socrates' argument is decisively affected by our grasp of the dramatic context in which it appears in several decisive ways. One obvious event that demands dramatic explanation is Polus' intervention in what had been a discussion between Gorgias himself and Socrates and his subsequent ineptness. Indeed, Polus is so inept that the pages barely qualify as part of a conversation, or at least a conversation with Polus. What we have is

Ironie und literarische Moderne

Behler, Ernst. Ironie and literarische Moderne. Paderborn: Schoningh, 1997. 336 pp. DM 68 hardcover. Only Ernst Behler could have written the book on irony, and this is it. His earlier books on include Klassische Ironie, Romantische Ironie. Zum Ursprung dieser Begriffe (1972), but of course Behler began publishing on in the 1950s when he became editor of the Friedrich Schlegel edition. This book resembles a literary psychogram of Western culture since Socrates, using as the defining trend of literary consciousness. Behler possessed the enormous reading and critical capacity to construct a picture that includes all periods and major figures as they relate to irony-ancient, modern, and postmodern. As recently as 1765 was narrowly defined as a figure of speech in which one expresses the opposite of what is said (7). Toward the end of the 18th century, however, the concept had expanded to include the author's emergence from the poetic structure of his fiction, sein Durchbrechen and Transzendieren der Dichtung, worm sich eine Problematisierung der literarischen Mitteilung anzeigt (8). Schlegel's conscious restructuring of the classical, rhetorical concept of represents a modern innovation (9), even though Schlegel and the Romantics did not use the term Romantic irony themselves (10). In his foreword Behler identifies the major players in the development of modern irony: Schlegel, Goethe, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, T. Mann, Walser, LukAcs, Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida. He then delivers detailed chapters including most of these figures. The book concludes with a discussion of in the schools of New Criticism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism and Deconstruction. The first chapter details the shift from classical to romantic irony. The earliest classical model is Socrates's position on the Delphic oracle pronouncing him the wisest of men, to which he responds that he knows nothing (22). For Aristophanes meant the opposite of urbane thinking and was a pejorative; this changes with Plato, who shows Socrates ironically feigning ignorance (23). Behler cautions that the Platonic view of cannot be limited to Plato's use of the term, but must include the Platonic dialogue itself, which is ironic in its conception (26). There follows a discussion of in Socrates, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and QuintilHan. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, both allegory and metaphor were of greater significance than (38). Stirrings of modern emerge in Dante and Luther (38, 39), and Swift lends a decidedly bitter tone to (40). By the time Schlegel identified in Diderot, Sterne, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, he was also thinking of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister in ironic terms (40, 41). Chapter two treats techniques of romantic before Romanticism, since the Romantics applied the term not to themselves, but to the ages they considered to be romantic, namely, the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (67). Here Behler discusses Don Quixote, Orlando Furioso, Canterbury Tales, Tristram Shandy and Apuleius's Metamorphoses, and works by F Schlegel, Tieck, Grabbe, Heine, Stendhal, and Lord Byron. The name was attached to these various expressions because all suggest a stylistic and spiritual kinship with Socrates, whose mocking questions and argumentation, though seemingly without continuity and purpose, nonetheless return dialectically and continue the narrative (65). The third chapter on the consciousness of literary modernity emphasizes that Bacon, Pascal, and Descartes injected modernity with the idea of scientific progress (70); while the course of scientific and philosophical progress was seen as infinite, human creativity was not (71-72). Behler thus establishes the borderline for a fully developed consciousness of modernity at the beginning of the Fruhromantik, where poetry, literature, and art were seen for the first time as a constant progression or innovation (72). …

Κοινωνικές ιεραρχίες στα κείμενα του Πλήθωνα και τα πρότυπά τους

<p>Yannis Smarnakis</p><p>Social Hierarchy in Pletho and its Models </p><p>The subject of this paper are the models of social organization proposed by G. Gemistos-Plethon to the despot of Peloponnese Theodore II Palaeologus and to the emperor Manuel II Palaeologus. The main sources for the investigation are two texts, written by Plethon, the first one between 1407-1415 and the second in 1418. The older text that was sent to the despot Theodore, depends on the platonic dialogues and proposes a similar model of three classes for the peloponnesian society. An interesting ideological shift was detected in the second text of 1418. Here the author proposes the division of the peloponnesian people into three parts, the soldiers, the priests and the peasants. The new model is identical to the ideological system of the three classes or functions in medieval France. I think that the main source of inspiration for Plethon was the specific ternary model that was grounded, in medieval France, on the neoplatonic tradition. Plethon transfers this ideological system to the social reality of his contemporary Peloponnese that was marked by the struggle of the powerful local aristocracy against the institution of monarchy. The ternary model gives a stable form to the peloponnesian society, justifies the role of the military aristocracy as the state against the Turks and legitimatizes the place of the monarch as the sovereign of the soldiers at the top of the social pyramid.</p><p> </p>

Plato's Counsel on Education

Plato's dialogues can be read as a carefully staged exhibition and investigation of paideia, education in the broadest sense, including all that affects the formation of character and mind. The twentieth century textbook Plato — the Plato of the Myth of the Cave and the Divided Line, the ascent to the Good through Forms and Ideas — is but one of his elusive multiple authorial personae, each taking a different perspective on his investigations. As its focused problems differ, each Platonic dialogue exhibits a somewhat different model for learning; each adds a distinctive dimension to Plato's fully considered counsel for education. Setting aside the important difficult questions about the chronological sequence in which the dialogues were written and revised, we can trace the argumentative rationale of Plato's fully considered views on paideia, on who should be educated by whom for what, on the stages and presuppositions of different kinds of learning. Those views are inextricably connected with his views about the structure of the soul, about the virtues and the politeia that can sustain a good life; and about cosmology and metaphysics.

George Pachymeres

The Christian thinker George Pachymeres in his work «Commentary on Plato's Parmenides» commenting the second case of the Platonic dialogue «Parmenides», deals with what the Athenian philosopher tells about the concept of time. His comments are characterized by his epistemologic adequacy and by the productive way he uses the philosophic and theologic tradition about this concept. Pachymeres conceives time in its dynamic development and relates it with the multidimensional aspect of One in other words the supreme power in the world of experiences. Simultaneously he explores the ways with which time is connected with some ontologic categories of ancient Greek thought and mainly with substance

Knowledge and Expertise in the Early Platonic Dialogues

Examinant le modele de l'expertise developpe dans les premiers dialogues platoniciens, l'A. distingue le modele de la connaissance qui les caracterise du modele de la connaissance deductive propose par G. Vlastos et soutenu par l'epistemologie grecque tardive. Comparant le modele de l'expertise avec la pratique socratique de l'elenchus, l'A. montre que l'interrogation sur les definitions et la methode de questionnement propres a Socrate sont compatibles avec le modele de la connaissance experte du «Charmide» et de l'«Ion», mais ne s'apparentent en rien au tournant deductif des dialogues tardifs et des oeuvres d'Aristote

The Idea(s) of Order of Platonic Dialogues and Their Hermeneutic Consequences

Nous etudierons ici quatre moyens de classer les dialogues de Platon: l'ordre chronologique (selon les dates de composition des dialogues), dramatique (les dates ou ils sont cense avoir eu lieu), paideutique (ordre selon lequel les dialogues etaient enseignes), et enfin metaphysique (selon l'evolution au niveau philosophique ou theorique). Les textes de Platon ainsi reconstruits selon differents scenarii ouvrent a de radicales differences d'interpretation de sa philosophie

Joyce the Egoist

Joyce the Egoist Jean-Michel Rabaté (bio) In January 1914, an obscure London journal titled the New Freewoman changed its name to the Egoist. In recent years, the change has become a subject of intense debate among scholars of literary modernism, some of whom claim that it marks a key transformation within literary modernism itself (or at least in its Anglo-American version), a turn away from modernism’s earlier affiliations with militant feminism and toward a more agonistic and decidedly male modernism. The work of Joyce, who published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and much of Ulysses in the journal, has become a crucial site for the unfolding of this debate, in part because his affiliations with the journal were critical to his early career and left lasting traces throughout his work, and in part because of his undisputed status as the paradigmatic master of modernist prose. How were the relations between modernism and feminism played out in the change of the journal’s name? What were the gender affiliations of egoism, and how did they overlap with the increasingly troubled status of the self and notions of modern heroism, and in what ways were they linked with the kind of relentless linguistic experimentalism so typically associated with Joyce? These have become pressing questions, and I propose to reconsider them by teasing out Joyce’s complicated associations with egoism, viewed here as a set of philosophical commitments that intersect in complex ways with contemporary debates about gender, politics, and language. [End Page 45] 1. From the New Freewoman to the Egoist One passage of Finnegans Wake shows that Joyce never forgot the magazine that had launched his literary career: “. . . I’m so keen on that New Free Woman with novel inside.” 1 However, the full context may qualify the tone of the speaking voice: Of I be leib in the immoralities? O, you mean the strangle for love and the sowiveall of the prettiest? Yep, we open hap coseries in the home. And once upon a week I improve on myself I’m so keen on that New Free Woman with novel inside. I’m always as tickled as can be over Man in a Surplus by the Lady who Pays the Rates. [FW, 145.25–31] Joyce’s irony is directed at the mixture of neo-Darwinism and feminism that was rampant among the magazine’s editors and contributors, perhaps a reflex of his gradual move away from any form of radical politics in the 1930s. A passage from Ulysses seems to confirm the idea that Joyce identified more with the Egoist than with the New Freewoman. 2 Stephen Dedalus, locked in debate with the librarian John Eglington, thinks to himself: “I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? Egomen. Who to unbelieve? Other chap” (U, 9.1078–80). Joyce plays on the Greek ego, followed by the intensive particle men (“really”), which, in a Platonic dialogue, means “yes, truly.” Gifford and Seidman, among others, see this as an allusion to the Egoist, a journal that indeed helped Joyce “to believe” in his work at a time when it faced the greatest difficulties in getting published; while the “other chap,” accordingly, would be George Roberts, the publisher who hesitated to issue Dubliners and finally destroyed the sheets in 1912. 3 Joyce, in fact, goes further than merely alluding to the journal; the passage directly quotes from the leading article by Dora Marsden in the Egoist of 1 August 1914, when the journal was still serializing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Marsden, meditating on the concept of “authority,” deftly links together the verb “to believe” with the notion “to leave doubt”: . . . the voices of authority echo one to another all the world round with the cry of “Believe, believe.” They mean, “Leave decision, leave it, leave it to us,” in effect asserting that knowledge is a spurious form, a degraded type of the ideal which is lack-of-knowledge. . . . The sacred is indeed the first weapon of defence against the prying questions of intelligence. . . . Very naturally, therefore...

The Discourse of Sodom in a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Text

This essay examines L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola, a seventeenth-century text written in Venice. L'Alcibiade is a sort of Platonic dialogue between a sodomite teacher and his young and attractive pupil. The teacher tries to convince his student to let him penetrate him. The discourse of the sodomite teacher is similar to Lacan's “discourse of the master.” Maggi brings to the fore the intrinsic ambiguities of the sodomite discourse. On the one hand, since he posits himself outside society, the sodomite is able to manipulate and distort any sort of discourse. The sodomite teacher believes that women embody the religious/political power that oppresses sodomites. The master knows that any discourse exclusively aims to acquire a certain power. On the other hand, the sodomite discourse is nothing but another form of power/oppression. The master subjugates the other through his “sodomite rhetoric,” based on lies and puns.

Who speaks? Who writes?

This paper argues that the concepts of writing and authorship in Plato are associated with monologism and absence rather than presence. The Phaedrus objects to writing precisely insofar as it creates that unre sponsive figure in the field of discursive which we have subsequently called the 'author'. The dialectical preference for question-and-answer is designed to resist anything resembling an author from entering the field of knowledge: the Socratic method resists monologism on epistemological and ethical grounds. However, the Platonic dialogues are split in their signature between a Socrates who speaks and a Socrates who writes. As the Platonic oeuvre increases, so it moves from graphic representation of the oral methods of Socrates to the status of a writing in its own terms. The Phaedrus is a crucial statement in this cultural tran sition. So, far from simply condemning writing, the dialogue accepts Plato's growth as an author of written compositions and his growing sense of himself as an author. What tradition has registered as 'the Socratic problem' can be reviewed according to this competition between the orality of the master and the writerly practices of his pupil. Between dialogism and monologism, speech and writing, absence and presence, Socrates and Plato, the concept of the author is generated. The Plato of the Phaedrus wants to grasp, to theorize, this new figure emerg ing on the chirographic horizons, one whom he would recognize less in Socrates, 'Homer' or Pythagoras than in the mirror of his own text.

Authority figures: metaphors of mastery from the Iliad to the Apocalypse

Reveals how certain strategic metaphors embedded in the early Western literary canon have promoted-and continue to promote-systems of inequality and social control. Collins examines texts ranging from the Homeric epics and the Platonic dialogues to Virgil's Aeneid and the Book of Revelation. Drawing on the linguistic and documentary evidence of usages in early societies, chiefly Greek and Hebrew, Collins has produced a penetrating examination of social and personal structures in those worlds.

DIE SOKRATISCHE LEHRSTRATEGIE UND IHRE RELEVANZ FÜR DIE HEUTIGE DIDAKTIK

Socrates (469–399 B.C.) formulated a unique method of teaching, of which the main characteristic is dialogue. We have no authentic record, but Plato has preserved the "Socratic conversations" in his dialogues. In the first part of this study, the Socratic strategy is examined through a comparative analysis of the early Platonic dialogues with the theories of critical rationalism and the cognitive theories based on motivation for achievement and learning. In the dialogues, Socrates invites his interlocutors to express their opinions, professing himself ignorant of the matter under discussion, but gradually challenges their certainties and moves from the particular and the egocentric to the general concept, using concrete examples. The second part of this study gives a detailed presentation of the elements of the Socratic strategy of teaching and learning: conversation, the exploitation of errors in teaching, aporia (confused doubt), critical reflection and intellectual honesty, and tolerance. These continue to be of relevance today and are timely in the context of shifting values and the need for a critical approach to knowledge.

The Ontological Relation "One-Many" according to the Neoplatonist Damascius

Abstract In his commentary on the Platonic dialogue Philebus, the Neoplatonic philosopher Damascius investigates the ontological question of the relation between the One as the highest principle and the many sensible beings produced through it. Three points are emphasized: 1. Damascius attempts to situate movement in the metaphysical realm and avoid a static metaphysical model by propounding a connection between sensible beings and their productive archetype through what he conceives as metaphysical amplification. 2. His explication of the relation between the physical and the metaphysical indicates that he is not concerned with just a general description, but instead intends to specify the forms of their mutual communication. To a certain degree, physical beings are presented as developments of metaphysical states in terms of the relation of "appearance" to "being," in the sense that the appearance teleologically portrays that which is ontologically complete. 3. Because Damascius sets logic in analytic relation to ontology and defines the conditions of this coordination, it gains no independent status, even as its propriety becomes explicit, for he shows its principal determination by ontology. Hence, Damascius remains within the framework of a consistent ontological realism.