Plato's Dream of Sophistry


Book Description

In Plato's Dream of Sophistry, Richard Marback shows that Plato's vision was remarkably accurate. Against histories of rhetoric that described Plato's influence mainly in terms of his overarching dominance, Marback argues that Plato's lasting influence results not from the force of the dialogues themselves but from continued investments in arguing about the dialogues.




Plato's Sophist


Book Description

Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman are a trilogy of Platonic dialogues that show Socrates formulating his conception of philosophy as he prepares the defense for his trial. Originally published together as The Being of the Beautiful, these translations can be read separately or as a trilogy. Each includes an introduction, extensive notes, and comprehensive commentary that examines the trilogy's motifs and relationships. "Seth Benardete is one of the very few contemporary classicists who combine the highest philological competence with a subtlety and taste that approximate that of the ancients. At the same time, he as set himself the entirely modern hermeneutical task of uncovering what the ancients preferred to keep veiled, of making explicit what they indicated, and hence...of showing the naked ugliness of artificial beauty."—Stanley Rose, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Seth Benardete (1930-2001) was professor of classics at New York University. He was the author or translator of many books, most recently The Argument of the Action, Plato's "Laws," and Plato's "Symposium," all published by the University of Chicago Press.




Tragically Speaking


Book Description

From German idealism onward, Western thinkers have sought to revalue tragedy, invariably converging at one cardinal point: tragic art risks aestheticizing real violence. Tragically Speaking critically examines this revaluation, offering a new understanding of the changing meaning of tragedy in literary and moral discourse. It questions common assumptions about the Greeks’ philosophical relation to the tragic tradition and about the ethical and political ramifications of contemporary theories of tragedy. Starting with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and continuing to the present, Kalliopi Nikolopoulou traces how tragedy was translated into an idea (“the tragic”) that was then revised further into the “beyond the tragic” of postmetaphysical contemporary thought. While recognizing some of the merits of this revaluation, Tragically Speaking concentrates on the losses implicit in such a turn. It argues that by translating tragedy into an idea, these rereadings effected a problematic subordination of politics to ethics: the drama of human conflict gave way to philosophical reflection, bracketing the world in favor of the idea of the world. Where contemporary thought valorizes absence, passivity, the Other, rhetoric, writing, and textuality, the author argues that their “deconstructed opposites” (presence, will, the self, truth, speech, and action, all of which are central to tragedy) are equally necessary for any meaningful discussion of ethics and politics.




Seeming and Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory


Book Description

The widespread understanding of language in the West is that it represents the world. This view, however, has not always been commonplace. In fact, it is a theory of language conceived by Plato, culminating in The Sophist. In that dialogue Plato introduced the idea of statements as being either true or false, where the distinction between falsity and truth rests on a deeper discrepancy between appearance and reality, or seeming and being. Robin Reames’s Seeming & Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory marks a shift in Plato scholarship. Reames argues that an appropriate understanding of rhetorical theory in Plato’s dialogues illuminates how he developed the technical vocabulary needed to construct the very distinctions between seeming and being that separate true from false speech. By engaging with three key movements of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Plato scholarship—the rise and subsequent marginalization of “orality and literacy theory,” Heidegger’s controversial critique of Platonist metaphysics, and the influence of literary or dramatic readings of the dialogues—Reames demonstrates how the development of Plato’s rhetorical theory across several of his dialogues (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Theaetetus, Cratylus, Republic, and Sophist) has been both neglected and misunderstood.




Professing Rhetoric


Book Description

Representing current theory and research in rhetoric, this volume brings together scholarship from a variety of orientations--theoretical, critical, historical, and pedagogical. Some contributions cover work that has previously been silenced or unrecognized, including Native American, African American, Latino, and women's rhetorics. Others explore rhetoric's relationship to performance and to the body, or to revising canons, stases, topoi, and pisteis. Still others are reworking the rhetorical lexicon to comprise contemporary theory. Among these diverse interests, rhetoricians find common themes and share intellectual and pedagogical enterprises that hold them together even as their institutional situations keep them apart. Topics discussed in this collection include: *Rhetoric as figurality; comparative and contrastive rhetorics; rhetoric and gender; and rhetorics of science and technology; *Rhetoric and reconceptions of the public sphere; rhetoric and public memory; and rhetorics of globalization and social change, including issues of race, ethnicity, and nationalism; *Rhetoric's institutionalized place in the academy, in relation to other humanities and to the interpretive social sciences; and *The place of rhetoric in the formation of departments and the development of pedagogy With its origins in the 2000 Rhetoric Society of America (RSA) conference, this volume represents the range and vitality of current scholarship in rhetoric. The conversations contained herein indicate that professing rhetoric is, at the turn of the millennium, an intellectual activity that engages with and helps formulate the most important public and scholarly questions of today. As such, it will be engaging reading for scholars and students, and is certain to provoke further thought, discussion, and exploration.




Plato As Author


Book Description

This collection, focusing on literary aspects of the Platonic dialogues, includes diverse essays by scholars from several different fields. Topics include friendship and desire in the Lysis, Socratic irony in Cratylus, and mystery imagery in Phaedrus.




Plato: Theaetetus and Sophist


Book Description

A new and lively translation of two Platonic dialogues widely read and discussed by philosophers, with introduction and notes.




Plato: Theaetetus and Sophist


Book Description

Plato's Theaetetus and Sophist are two of his most important dialogues, and are widely read and discussed by philosophers for what they reveal about his epistemology and particularly his accounts of belief and knowledge. Although they form part of a single Platonic project, these dialogues are not usually presented as a pair, as they are in Christopher Rowe's new and lively translation. Offering a high standard of accuracy and readability, the translation reveals the continuity between these dialogues and others in the Platonic corpus, especially the Republic. The supporting introduction and notes help the reader to follow the arguments as they develop, explaining their structure, context and interpretation. This new edition challenges current scholarly approaches to Plato's work and will pave the way for fresh interpretations both of Theaetetus and Sophist and of Plato's writings in general.




The Dialectic of Essence


Book Description

The Dialectic of Essence offers a systematic new account of Plato's metaphysics. Allan Silverman argues that the best way to make sense of the metaphysics as a whole is to examine carefully what Plato says about ousia (essence) from the Meno through the middle period dialogues, the Phaedo and the Republic, and into several late dialogues including the Parmenides, the Sophist, the Philebus, and the Timaeus. This book focuses on three fundamental facets of the metaphysics: the theory of Forms; the nature of particulars; and Plato's understanding of the nature of metaphysical inquiry. Silverman seeks to show how Plato conceives of "Being" as a unique way in which an essence is related to a Form. Conversely, partaking ("having") is the way in which a material particular is related to its properties: Particulars, thus, in an important sense lack essence. Additionally, the author closely analyzes Plato's idea that the relation between Forms and particulars is mediated by form-copies. Even when some late dialogues provide a richer account of particulars, Silverman maintains that particulars are still denied essence. Indeed, with the Timaeus's introduction of the receptacle, there are no particulars of the traditional variety. This book cogently demonstrates that when we understand that Plato's concern with essence lies at the root of his metaphysics, we are better equipped to find our way through the labyrinth of his dialogues and to better appreciate how they form a coherent theory.




Paradigm, Logos, and Myth in Plato's Sophist and Statesman


Book Description

In a sustained study of the Sophist and Statesman, this book explores the use of paradigm, logos, and myth. Plato introduces in these dialogues the term “paradigm” to signify an image or model that can be used to yield insight into higher, ethical realities that are themselves beyond direct visual portrayal. He employs the term to signify an inductive example that can be defined. Finally, Plato shows how to rework existing narrative and myth to an ethically appropriate end. Since this exercise in the Statesman is described as training in dialectic, in Paradigm, Logos, and Myth in Plato's Sophist and Statesman Conor Barry demonstrates how these later works expand the compass of dialectic beyond narrow conceptions that restrict the scope of dialectic to the use of logical techniques. Rather, dialectic is the practice of dialogue as portrayed in the Platonic dialogues, which can involve appeal to analogies and figurative expressions in the search for an understanding of the ethical good. Plato’s dialogues, as works of literary art, aim to lead people to seek such understanding. Nevertheless, insofar as the dialogues are themselves artistic productions, they must also be objects of critical scrutiny and questioning.