Platonic Dialogues Research Articles

И.Г. ЮНГ-ШТИЛЛИНГ И А.Т. БОЛОТОВ: РЕЦЕПЦИЯ ИДЕЙ НЕМЕЦКОГО МИСТИКА В НЕАКАДЕМИЧЕСКОЙ СРЕДЕ

German mystic and theosophist Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817) gained immense popularity in Russia at the beginning of the 19th century. This fact is proven by numerous translations of his works and reminiscences of his ideas in literary texts and memoirs of the time. Scientist, philosopher, and writer A.T. Bolotov (1738–1833) was his great admirer, follower, and popularizer. The reception of Jung-Stilling is reflected both in Bolotov’s poetic experiments and his works “The old man with his grandson, or Conversations of an old man with his young grandson” (1822), “Assumed events in the Afterlife” (1823) and “About the souls of dead people” (1823) written in the form of Platonic dialogues. Bolotov’s example makes it possible to analyze the reception of the German mystic’s ideas and their dissemination in the non-academic environment.

A “Prophet” in the Country of “Pharisees”. “Social and cultural dynamics” by Pitirim Sorokin and its Critics. Article 1. Pitirim Sorokin and Alexander Goldenweiser

The article is devoted to the history of the controversy that arose after the publication of the first three volumes of “Social and Cultural Dynamics” by Pitirim Sorokin and American anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser. The reasons why Sorokin’s work was rejected by academic American sociology are analyzed. A full list of reviews on “Dynamics” is provided that was published by international media in 1937–1942. The possible causes of the conflict that broke out between Sorokin and Goldeneizer over the authorship of the “principle of limited opportunities” or the “principle of limit” are analyzed. The appendix to the article includes Goldenweiser’s review of Sorokin’s “Dynamics”, written in the form of a “platonic dialogue”, and Sorokin’s response to it, translated to Russian for the first time.

The Figure of Socrates in Numenius of Apamea: Theology, Platonism, and Pythagoreanism (fr. 24 des Places)

Numenius is one of the most important authors who, in the Imperial Age, deal with the figure of Socrates. Socrates is important in the Platon­ic tradition, in particular in the sceptical tradition, when the Socratic dubitative “spirit” of the first Platonic dialogues became important to justify the “suspension of judgement.” Numenius criticises the whole Academic tradition by saying that the Academics (particularly the sceptics) betrayed the original doctrine of Plato and formulated a new image of Socrates. For Numenius, Socrates plays a central role because Plato would have inherited his doctrine. What does Socrates’s doctrine consist in? According to Numenius, Socrates theorised a “doctrine of three Gods” (which can be likely found in the second Platonic epistle) which is strictly bound up with the main aspect of Plato’s thought. In fact, in Numenius’s view, Plato belongs to a genealogy which can be linked to Pythagoras himself. From this perspective, Numenius says that Socrates’s original thought is a theology which also belongs to the Pythagorean tradition and which Plato further developed. For Nume­nius, Socrates is not the philosopher of doubt, but a theologian who first theorised the existence of three levels of reality (Gods), which is also the kernel of Numenius’s metaphysical system. For this reason, Numenius puts Socrates within a theological genealogy that begins with Pythago­ras and continues with Socrates and Plato, and that the Academics and the Socratics failed to understand.

Platonismo e aristotelismo nelTimaeusdi Cicerone

AbstractCicero’sTimaeuslegitimately stands as the first Latin exegesis of the Platonic dialogue. I shall deal with the interpretation of §§19–21, a passage that departs significantly from the Greek text in several respects. The aim of this paper is to explore the role Aristotelianism might have played in Cicero’sTimaeus. Among the points that support such an analysis is the mention of the Peripatetic Cratippus in the prologue. The interpretative scenario I suggest considers both Cratippus’ role and Antiochus’s philosophical system with its agreement between Platonism and Aristotelianism.

On the Aporetic Nature of Plato’s Lysis

Centering on the early Platonic dialogues, this paper delineates the importance of considering Plato’s Lysis’ as rightful inclusion to Jan Szaif’s proposal of “core group” of aporetic dialogue. This paper highlights a synoptic presentation of the development of Lysis’s reception by modern scholars of Plato (Platonic scholars) at the beginning of this discourse to establish a compelling argument for its aporetic nature. It then proceeds with a revisit to Szaif’s article Socrates and the Benefits of Puzzlement. The first section, considering its importance, emphasizes the evident possibility of opening his list of ‘core group’ of aporetic dialogue to Lysis benefitting the said dialogue. This exposition concludes with the philosophical nature of friendship, even love, must neither begin in Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium nor in Aristotle’s conception of friendship in Nicomachean Ethics. Alternatively, cognizant of the aporetic tradition followed and practiced by Plato, all studies on the said topics may begin with Lysis.

“Sociologos: Platonic Dialogue” by Alexander Goldenweizer and “Pseudo-Sociologos. A Reply to Professor Goldenweiser” by Pitirim Sorokin. Transl. from Eng. by V.V. Sapov

For the reader’s consideration— an article never before translated to Russian written by American anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser, where he attempts to dismantle the first three volumes of Pitirim Sorokin’s “Social and Cultural Dynamics” that came out in 1937. In it he comprehensively criticizes Sorokin’s “Dynamics” to the point where he completely refutes all of it. The article is written in the form of a “platonic dialog” partaken by world famous scientists, artists and sociologists, with Socrates himself presiding on this “Areopagus”, who, after hearing out the prosecution, sentences Sorokin to capital punishment. Sorokin responded with an article where he analyzed all charges against him and issued his own decisive verdict— “not guilty”. The publication is meant to commemorate 85 years since the release of the first three volumes of “Social and Cultural Dynamics”.

Aileen R. Das, Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus

The title of Aileen Das’ first monograph, Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus, may mislead readers into thinking that she is solely interested in contributing to the growing literature on reception studies of this important Platonic dialogue. As valuable as Das’ contributions to that literature are, in actual fact Das weaves through Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew texts and manuscripts to investigate the relationship between medicine and philosophy in Late Antique Roman and Islamic societies before 1200. Reviewed by: Nahyan Fancy, Published Online (2022-07-31)Copyright © 2022 by Nahyan FancyArticle PDF Link: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/aestimatio/article/view/39102/29788 Corresponding Author: Nahyan Fancy,DePauw UniversityE-Mail: nahyanfancy@depauw.edu

Is the True Self God at Alcibiades 133c?

Abstract Throughout the Platonic tradition, one encounters the idea that the true self of each person is, at bottom, numerically identical to a singular reality and hence that the distinction between one person’s true self and another’s is either illusory or derivative in some way. I label this idea the Strong Identity Thesis. While several passages might be cited to locate this thesis in the Platonic dialogues themselves, the striking culmination of the First Alcibiades is especially suggestive. In this paper, however, I argue that this passage does not in fact support the attribution of the Strong Identity Thesis to Plato. Instead, I will argue for the Weak Identity Thesis: namely that there is merely an analogical or qualitative link between the true self and some ultimate reality.

The Eleatic Stranger in Sophist dialogue

Within the framework of the discussion about the existence of a spokesman in the Platonic dialogues, we look, in the first part, into the possible transfer of this spokesman’s function from Socrates to the Eleatic Stranger, identifying the contact and divergence points between both characters. In the second part, we try to show that this transfer has a dramatic staging at the beginning of the Sophist dialogue, where Socrates makes a demand that enables the Stranger to demonstrate his genuine philosophical condition.

"Almighty Dirt": A Report on "Caliban's Mirror: The 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium," Trinity College Dublin, 5-7 May 2022

"Almighty Dirt":A Report on "Caliban's Mirror: The 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium," Trinity College Dublin, 5-7 May 2022 James Green For the first time in around three years, I attended an in-person conference. Instead of an abrupt transition from the world of online symposia, this move into the reality of dear dirty Dublin felt, thankfully, smooth and natural. The first thing to say about "Caliban's Mirror: The 2022 Wilde and Joyce Symposium" is that the conference could easily not have happened at all. Obstacles facing speakers included visa problems and an ongoing global pandemic, and panels as advertised on the website had to be changed as and when needs arose, calling for altruism from one attendee, Jinan Ashraf, who volunteered to move her paper on Joyce's influence on Indian modernism to one of the final panels. That the conference went ahead at all is due to the heroic efforts of its organizers, Casey Lawrence and Graham Price, with assistance from Sam Slote, who managed to put it together while not being in the country, for example, and even picked up a dislocated knee right on the eve of the conference. The second thing to note is that, despite being the first conference to focus specifically on the connections between Oscar Wilde and James Joyce, it felt entirely right that such a comparison be made. In fact, multiple attendees noted almost immediately that it is surprising such a conference had not happened sooner. Joyce treated the topic of Wilde in his Trieste lecture "La Poetà di Salome" and his A Portrait echoes, at least in title, Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. The two cultivated a dandyish public persona and foregrounded questions of aesthetics in their work. In light of the difficulties raised by the conference gods, all who attended remain grateful to the organizers and fate itself to allow us to talk about this subject at length. The conference also was marred by the shocking loss of John Paul Riquelme, who was due to give a fascinating paper on Wilde's use of Platonic dialogues in his critical essays, echoed in Joyce's "Scylla and Charybdis." The abstract he submitted is available to view on the conference website, making it likely his final published work. Noting his generosity and enthusiasm, Graham and Casey fondly dedicated the conference to his memory. But his paper showed the richness and queerness of the comparisons to be made between these two bodies of work. On the first day, there was a panel on such queer comparisons: Michael F. Davis queered the complex genealogy of "The Dead" by looking at Wilde's and Anatole France's depictions of Judea in Salomé and The Procurator of Judea, Maureen de Leo considered Wilde's and Joyce's shared silences over homosexuality, while Tim Ziaukas and [End Page 404] Christopher Wells both offered particularly fruitful, searching, and witty readings of Buck Mulligan via Wilde. This panel set the tone of much of the conference's proceedings––rigorous and humorous, politically charged and pleasurable. Another vital theme of the first day was exile. Adrian Howlett, James Green, and Emma Marns, who shared her first-ever conference paper, considered the various routes into Joyce and Wilde's shared status as exiles. One undeniably positive facet of the conference was how welcoming an environment it was for graduate students and early-career researchers. Their papers sat productively alongside those of more senior colleagues, who responded warmly to the insights of junior colleagues. The first day's roster evinces such a range. These talks were then followed by Margot Gayle Backus's enthralling keynote: "James Joyce and Oscar Wilde: Modernism and the Politics of Punitive Child Removal." Spurred by political fury at the practice of child removal as a systematic form of social engineering, from Tudor Ireland to Francisco Franco's Spain and more recent pink scares in the United States, Backus considered with wit, attentiveness, and fluency the shared anxieties of Wilde and Joyce over the loss of children (which, for Wilde, became an all-too-grim reality in his life). In Backus's reading, Joyce's reaction to Wilde's fall became most pronounced...

METRIOPÁTHEIA KAÌ APÁTHEIA EN EL NEOPLATONISMO TARDÍO: OLIMPIODORO DE ALEJANDRÍA

The conserved readings of Olympidorus on some dialogues of Plato imply an audience with limited philosophical experience as opposed to those carried out by Proclus, and even Damascius. However, such readings reveal an acute sensitivity to the ethical issues of the early Platonic dialogues and their dramatic context. It is commonly recognized that the Neoplatonic school of Alexandria, compared to the school of Athens, gives more room to Aristotelianism in its elaboration of some philosophical doctrines. In this sense, the present work tries to investigate such consideration in one of his conserved works, On Plato First Alcibiades. By discussing the skopós of the dialogue and the reading of Proclus and Damascius, Olympiodorus seems to give rise to more than one skopós: political as well as cathartic and contemplative. All this within the framework of the hierarchy of Neoplatonic virtues, in which both the Aristotelian imprint and the Stoic influence are perceived.

Why did Plato choose Alcibiades to praise Socrates in the Symposium?

The contrast between the content of Alcibiades’ speech and the character delivering it is a well-known interpretative difficulty of the last speech of Plato’s Symposium, for Alcibiades reveals important truths about Socrates and his philosophical practice, yet he seems to be the least suited man to do so and praise philosophy. Offering a more positive account of Alcibiades as a character in the Platonic dialogues, I argue that this difficulty can be solved provided one takes into account the political agenda of the Symposium.

HOW TO READ A PLATONIC DIALOGUE

In this essay, I explain and clarify Jacob Klein’s significant yet difficult account of how to read a Platonic dialogue. I argue that Klein takes Plato’s dialogues to be discursively incomplete dramas that the audience is asked to make whole by its participation. A Platonic dialogue thus comes into being only when readers or auditors examine the arguments and themselves.

Aristotle and the Invention of Platonism

The guiding suggestion of this article is intimated in the title: “Platonism,” that set of “philosophical positions” supposedly present in the Platonic dialogues (pre-eminently the “theory of forms,” but also “Plato’s metaphysics,” his “epistemology,” his “moral theory,” his “political theory” etc.) are not so much discovered in the dialogues as they are invented out of a very specific (mis) reading of those dialogues. And the first great “misreader” was Aristotle, who, I argue, first made possible the set of assumptions about philosophy and about philosophic writing that, in turn, made anything like “Platonism” possible.

Plato’s Phaedo and “the Art of Glaucus”: Transcending the Distortions of Developmentalism

In a 1985 article entitled “The Art of Glaukos,” Diskin Clay suggested that the enigmatic passage at the beginning of the geological myth in Phaedoreferred toRepublic10, where the soul is likened to the sea-creature Glaucus whose true nature, like the soul’s, is obscured by the distortions imposed by underwater life. Starting with a defense of Clay’s ingenious suggestion, my purpose is to compare Phaedoto Glaucus, with its true nature obscured by traditional assumptions about the order in which Plato composed his dialogues, and thus how they should be read. At least part of the reason that Clay’s thesis has not been embraced is because it clashes with the dogma that Phaedocannot refer back to Republic; I want to challenge that dogma. Borrowing from Catherine Zuckert the notion that, since Phaedocomes at the end of Socrates’ story, it can usefully be read as the culmination of the Platonic dialogues, I will show how a “late” Phaedo—i.e., a reading of the dialogue that is open to the possibility that it refers to more than one dialogue generally considered to be later than it with respect to composition—recovers its true nature, presently encrusted with the oysters and seaweed of an outdated developmentalism that has obscured this culminating masterpiece of Plato’s dramatic and philosophical art.

The Critique of Philip Sidney and Percy Bysshe Shelley on Plato’s Views about Poetry

In the platonic dialogue Ion, Socrates clarifies that poetic creation is a result of inspiration but not of knowledge. As a gift from the Muses, poetry cannot even have a didactic role; since it is not rational and does not constitute a product of right reason, it cannot satisfy the needs of the person who aspires to the acquisition of wisdom. This insistence of Plato on the potential moral deficiency of poetry proves that only epistemological criteria can assist the political balances that are required in his ideal Polis. Since poetry is mimesis and a subcategory of rhetoric, it is deduced that it stands far from the truth. For Philip Sidney, however, in his critique of Plato’s views, the poet is directly connected with “poiein”, the act of creating. As a creator, he is close to the truth, and he is an owner of the Idea, to which he urges other human beings. As such, the poet is a stronger intellectual figure than the philosopher, due to the fact that he does not abstractly think of moral values but helps to proliferate them. The poet never lies, despite what Plato claims, because the poet never confirms the knowledge of anything, quite unlike the philosopher. Shelley, on the other hand, places great emphasis on the role of imagination within the context of poetic work. He declares that poetic imagination exceeds the borders of reason, thus being rendered the only human faculty that can not only see the ideal forms that Plato is enthusiastic about but also is capable of competently expressing the “eternal truth of life”. The two English poets are in accord about poetry signifying unity and harmony, not only with the abstract truth of the world but with virtue and law as well, providing the human being with the right ontological orientation.

L’origine égyptienne de la doctrine non écrite de Platon

Ancient Egypt is mentioned in several platonic dialogues. We suggest focusing on the passages that concern the theme of writing, in order to validate the hypothesis of an influence of Egyptian philosophy on Plato’s conception of the relation between orality and writing. This relation, which manifests itself in the coexistence of both the written dialogues and the non-written doctrine, is a dialectical relation. In fact, its dialectical character is shown through two opposite discourses that originate from Egypt: on the one hand there is the critique of writing in the Phaidros (section 1), and on the other hand we find its praise in the Timaeus (section 2). The analysis of the dialectic of orality and writing (section 3) emphasizes the crucial role of the praxis in Egyptian philosophical thought, which influenced Plato for developing a non-written doctrine as a necessary complement to the written dialogues.

BUEN ALUMNO DE SÓCRATES, PLATÓN QUIERE CONDUCIR A LA FILOSOFÍA A TRAVÉS DE LOS ESCRITOS

In this paper, I would like to show, departing from the Platonic dialogues, how and in what sense Plato reveals himself as a genuine disciple of Socrates. The text is organized into two parts: in the first I develop what Plato learned from Socrates; in the second, I would like to reflect on the elements that Plato elaborated autonomously from Socrates. The first part clarifies a number of elements: the complexity of the teacher's own presentation, his unbeatable domain in the discussions and the significance of this kind of practice. In the second part I will try to show that Plato, in the Theaetetus , draws a picture (that of the midwife) so as to describe the activity of his teacher. This activity leads him to deploy a metaphysics in which he recovers some aspects of Socrates' teaching, and to reflect not only about the legacy he inherited but also about the meaning of the written productions in and for philosophy.

Philosophy Plays: A Neo-Socratic Way of Performing Public Philosophy

Th is paper provides an explanatory rationale within a theoretical framework for the Philosophy Plays project. Th e object of the Philosophy Plays is to introduce philosophy, and especially Western Philosophy, to the general public through philosophical presentations by professional philosophers incorporating drama. Th ey have created a public domain for philosophy where relevant issues and topics of public interest and importance, such as love, immortality, happiness, friendship, religion, knowledge, trust, pets, morality and corruption, can be presented by professional philosophers and discussed in an open forum with members of the general public. Th e Philosophy Plays, like Platonic dialogues, seek to engage their audiences both intellectually (primarily through the philosophical talk) and emotionally (primarily through the drama). So like Plato’s dialogues, from which they draw their inspiration, the Philosophy Plays which combine dialectic (the philosophical talk) with rhetoric (the drama) seek to engage their public audiences in a realistic and shared lived experience thus rendering philosophy a practical and meaningful activity for all participants. Th us all our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we can never fi ll. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality (Pascal, 1966:s.200; p. 95).

Rolling Sisyphus’ Stone Uphill? Plato’s Philosophy of History and Progress Reappraised

AbstractThis paper addresses the following questions about Plato’s concept of ‘history’: (a) is there a ‘philosophy of history’ in Plato’s thought?; (b) if this concept exists, do the dialogues lay out a single, cohesive understanding of ‘history’ or does it vary from text to text?; (c) how does Plato understand the word ‘history’? This inquiry also addresses the role of ‘progress’ in some of the main Platonic dialogues. An in-depth analysis of these texts can also help us find a solution to the problem of the end of ‘history’, when a civilization either physically collapses (due to a catastrophic event) or morally decays (because of the corruption of its citizens and politicians). I argue that Plato’s ‘philosophy of history’ is not necessarily Sisyphean, but that it attempts to work out how to avoid the entropic decay of civilization and to preserve cultural – almost ‘genetic’ – ‘memory’ in order to counter the danger of cyclical regression.