By Thomas A. Szlezák
Interpreting Plato bargains a concise and illuminating perception into the complexities and problems of the Platonic dialogues, offering a useful textual content for any scholar of Plato's philosophy.Taking as a place to begin the critique of writing within the Phaedrus -- the place Socrates argues e-book can't decide upon its reader nor can it shield itself opposed to misinterpretation -- examining Plato deals recommendations to the issues of analyzing the dialogues. during this ground-breaking ebook, Thomas A. Szlezak persuasively argues that the dialogues are designed to stimulate philosophical enquiry and to raise philosophy to the world of oral dialectic.
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Sample text
In this sense the Platonic dialogues can also defend themselves on their own against attacks, since the attacks of the noncomprehending do not reach their deeper level of meaning at all, but the doubts of the reader who can understand are dispelled by means of the more recent ‘answers’. According to this theory, these capabilities make a Platonic dialogue an ‘active’ text, a ‘partner’ with whom the reader must seek out the ‘conversation’. Let us recall to begin with that the positive capacities thus found in the ‘active’ dialogue-book are gained by denying the failings which Plato in the Phaedrus ascribes to in general.
Socrates first introduces a myth of the Egyptian god Theuth, who according to the interpretatio Graeca was identified with Hermes and was regarded as the discoverer of writing. The fact that Plato has recourse to the mode of mythological thought about the ‘first discoverer’ (the) shows that he is surveying writing in its most fundamental aspect, for in mythological thinking the inalienable nature of things was established at their original creation. So the god Theuth brought writing with other discoveries before King Thamus and praised it as a means of making the Egyptians ‘wiser and stronger in memory’ ( , 274e5).
He refers to a poem of Simonides which Socrates, too, as he assures Protagoras, knows very well and thinks highly of. But, in Protagoras’ opinion, Simonides contradicts himself in the space of a few lines by saying first that it is difficult to become a virtuous man and then by finding fault with Pittacus for his statement that it is difficult to be noble—how can a poem be ‘good’ if it exhibits such a contradiction (339b–d)? By his initial positive appraisal of the poem, Socrates is committed to ‘help’ the poet and thereby himself as well ( 340a1; cf.