Plato's Styles and Characters: Between Literature and Philosophy

Description

The significance of Plato's literary style to the content of his ideas is one of the central problems in the study of Plato. This volume presents some of the most recent scholarship on the wide range of issues related to Plato's dialogue form. The essays address general questions concerning Plato's literary style, the relation of his style to other genres and traditions in Ancient Greece, and Plato's characters and his purpose in using them. Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- Plato's Literary Style -- Beyond Language and Literature -- The Three Waves of Dialectic in the Republic -- Plato's Unfinished Trilogy: Timaeus-Critias-Hermocrates -- The Myth of the Winged Chariot in the Phaedrus: A Vehicle for Philosophical Thinking -- Perspectivism, Proleptic Writing and Generic agón: Three Readings of the Symposium -- Plato's Argumentative Strategies in Theaetetus and Sophist -- Other Genres and Traditions -- Detailed Completeness and Pleasure of the Narrative. Some Remarks on the Narrative Tradition and Plato -- The meeting scenes in the incipit of Plato's dialogue -- The Philosophical Writing and the Drama of Knowledge in Plato -- Comic Dramaturgy in Plato: Observations from the Ion -- Amicus Homerus: Allusive Art in Plato's Incipit to Book X of the Republic (595a-c) -- Performance and Elenchos in Plato's Ion -- Plato and the Catalogue Form in Ion -- Orphic Aristophanes at Plato's Symposium -- Socrates as a physician of the soul -- The Style of Medical Writing in the Speech of Eryximachus: Imitation and Contamination -- Gorgias, the eighth orator. Gorgianic echoes in Agathon's Speech in the Symposium -- Plato's Phaedrus: A Play Inside the Play -- Plato's Characters -- He longs for him, he hates him and he wants him for himself: The Alcibiades Case between Socrates and Plato -- Five Platonic Characters -- Who Is Plato's Callicles and What Does He Teach? -- Doing business with Protagoras (Prot. 313e): Plato and the Construction of a Character -- Theaetetus and Protarchus: two philosophical characters or what a philosophical soul should do -- The Role of Diotima in the Symposium: The Dialogue and Its Double -- Contributors -- Citations Index -- Author Index -- Subject Index.