By Myles Burnyeat, Michael Frede, Dominic Scott
The 7th Platonic Letter describes Plato's makes an attempt to show the ruler of Sicily, Dionysius II, right into a thinker ruler alongside the strains of the Republic. It explains why Plato became from politics to philosophy in his adolescence and the way he then attempted to use his rules to real politics afterward. It additionally units out his perspectives approximately language, writing and philosophy. As such, it represents a probably the most important resource of knowledge approximately Plato, who tells us nearly not anything approximately himself in his dialogues. yet is it actual? students have debated the problem for hundreds of years, even though fresh opinion has moved in its favour. The starting place of this e-book used to be a seminar given in Oxford in 2001 through Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, of the main eminent students of historic philosophy in contemporary a long time. Michael Frede starts via casting doubt at the Letter via it from the final point of view of letter writing in antiquity, whilst it used to be fairly general to manufacture letters via well-known figures from the prior. either then assault the authenticity of the letter head-on via exhibiting how its philosophical content material conflicts with what we discover within the Platonic dialogues. in addition they think of the query of why the Letter was once written, no matter if as an try and exculpate Plato from the cost of meddling in politics (Frede), or as an try to painting, via literary capability, the ways that human weak point and feelings may end up in failures in political existence (Burnyeat).
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Extra info for The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter
Example text
I say ‘presumably’ because there also is a response to it, Ep. 47 How this is to be explained, I will leave aside and proceed on the assumption that the letter is addressed to Dion. In fact, one reason to think that this is a letter by Speusippus to Dion is that it uses language which is so strikingly close to Plutarch’s language in characterizing the letter he is referring to that one might begin to wonder whether it is the same letter. In Ep. XXXV Speusippus tells Dion to watch that he has not become óåìíüò and ÆPŁÜäÅò,48 because children in the street and everybody else are talking about him, whereas what he needs to do is to pursue a course of justice.
B) Ep. XII to Archytas of Tarentum 1. We have already noted that this letter was regarded as spurious in Byzantine times: IíôغݪåôÆØ ‰ò ïP —ºÜôøíïò23 in A, O1, and O4. Perhaps this is a note going back to late antiquity. I now want to pursue the question of its authenticity further. There are reasons to think that the letter cannot be much earlier than the end of the second century BC. e. Aristophanes’ letters are not the thirteen letters listed by Thrasyllus; (4) it would be evidence for the growth of the collection.
L. this is an answer to Archytus’ letter. In it Archytas tells Plato that (in response to Plato’s letter) he has gone to Lucania to track down Ocellus’ descendents, and obtained four books by Ocellus, which he is sending; the rest he will send, as soon as he should find them. A question has been raised as to whether Ep. L. L. claims. L. VIII, 80, which does not talk about Plato’s writings. I do not see any difficulty in this; Plato is responding to the letter accompanying the books, but at the same time referring to an earlier letter of Archytas.