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The Dramatic Aspect of Plato's Phaedo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2010

Kenneth Dorter
Kenneth Dorter
Affiliation:
University of Guelph
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Extract

It has often been remarked that the dramatic element of the Platonic writings is unique in philosophy, and there have been many attempts to account for its presence. Recently there has been a greater tendency to see it as more than mere ornamentation or naturalism, as an essential element in understanding the philosophy of the dialogue. The one unquestionably authentic statement by Plato on philosophical writing is in the Phaedrus where Socrates, who wrote no philosophy, is made to criticize treatises because, among other things, a treatise “rolls everywhere, equally to those who understand it and to those for whom it is not fitting, and does not know to whom it should speak and to whom not” (275e). Plato, who did write philosophy, wrote no treatises, and it is reasonable to expect that he regarded the dialogue form which he employed as free from the objections to treatises.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , March 1970 , pp. 564 - 580
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1970

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References

1 E. g., Paul Friedländer: Plato, Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1958, 1964, 1969; Leo Strauss: The City and Man, Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964; Jacob Klein: A Commentary on Plato's “Meno”, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965; Stanley Rosen: “The Role of Eros in Plato's Republic”, Review of Metaphysics, XVIII, 3, March, 1965, and his Plato's “Symposium”, New Haven: Yale U. P., 1968; and Drew Hyland: “Why Plato Wrote Dialogues”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, I, 1, 1968.

2 The authenticity of the seventh letter is not an issue here. The letter provides a convenient formulation of Plato's position, but that this is his position i s argued not on the basis of the letter, but on the evidence of the dialogues themselves.

3 To preserve the relation between πειθω and πιστι, and to emphasize their frequency, I shall translate the various forms of these terms by forms of “convince” and “conviction”, respectively, even where a synonym would be more idiomatic.

4 There are special cases of this, such as the Gorgias and Philebus, where Gorgias and Philebus, though present, allow their positions to be advocated by their disciples.

5 E.g., R. S. Brumbaugh: Plato's Mathematical Imagination, Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 1954, p. 163; F. M. Cornford: Plato's Cosmology, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, p. 27; R. Hackforth: Plato's “Phaedrus”, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, p. 90; J. A. Stewart: The Myths of Plato, London: Centaur Press, 1960, p. 132.

6 Cf. R. Hackforth: Plato's Examination of Pleasure, New York: Bobbs Merrill, p. 16 n. 1; Jacob Klein, p. 27; Friedrich Schleiermacher: Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato, Cambridge: Deighton, 1836, p. 18.

7 E.g., J. Burnet: Plato's “Phaedo”, Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1911, p. 47, and on 80b10 and 107b6; P. Friedlander: Platon, 3, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1960, s. 34, 37; R. Hackforth: Plato's “Phaedo”, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, p. 19; Klein, pp. 26, 108, 126; J. B. Skemp: The Theory of Motion in Plato's Later Dialogues, Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1942, p. 7; A. E. Taylor: Plato, the Man and his Work, Cleveland: World, 1956, p. 184.

Cf. 67b, 80b, 84c, 85d-e, 91c, 107a-b.

8 Forms of “convince” and “conviction” occur, in fact, more than fifty times in the Phaedo, notably in the following passages: 6ge3–70b2, 73b3–10, 77a6–11, 77e3–7, 88cl–d8, 8gd4–8, 107a2–b6.

9 In fact, Plato never depicted what two mature philosophers might say to each other.

10 100d4; cf. 10234. At 105b8–c2 it is made “more refined” (but note the comparative).

11 Love of money and Love of honour (the desiderative and spirited elements—cf. Burnet on 68c2) are attributed to the lover of the body (68c), thereby being associated with the body rather than the soul. Later, the examples of gluttony, wantonness and love of drink (81e5), and of injustice, tyranny and rapine (82a3) correspond respectively to the desiderative and spirited elements, as do the lovers of riches and the lovers of rule and honour (82C6–7—cf. Burnet on 82C5); and once again these are associated with the body (81b). Similarly, at 94b-e Socrates makes a tripartite distinction virtually identical with that of the tripartite soul in the Republic, but here the two lower divisions are called feelings of the body (cf. Hackforth, Plato's “Phaedo”, p. 117 n. 1 and 2). Thus “soul” is limited here to the highest level of the tripartite soul (cf. R. S. Bluck, Plato's “Phaedo”, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, pp. 3, 5; Klein, p. 131 n. 65, and p. 147; and Hackforth: Plato's “Phaedrus”, p. 76).

Similarly, in the Timaeus the desiderative and spirited elements are ascribed to the mortal part of the soul (69d, 90bl).

12 See Hackforth: Plato's “Phaedrus”, p. 87—although he regards this as an oversight of Plato's.

13 The first and last proofs, for example, explicitly refer not only to man, but to all temporal things, personal and impersonal alike (70d7–9, 106a2–c7).

14 Cf. Friedländer, 1, p. 183: for Plato “the invisible, Hades, and the intelligible are interchangeable terms”.

15 In the case of the Phaedo, a paper by Maurice Cohen—“Un-Natural Deduction in Plato's Phaedo” (presented at the Tenth Annual Congress, 1966, of the Canadian Philosophical Association, Sherbrooke, Quebec)—arrives at this same conclusion on the basis of a strictly logical analysis.

16 On66a3; cf. on 88d9.

17 63a2, 66a3, 66c2, 76e9, 88d9, 115b9.