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 | | Platonic Errors: Plato, a Kind of Poet (Contributions in Philosophy) by Gene Fendt, David Rozema ISBN-10: 9780313307652 ISBN-10: 0-313-30765-2 ISBN-13: 9780313307652 ISBN-13: 978-0-313-30765-2 Hardcover 1998-12-30 Greenwood Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description While the dramatic approach to Plato's dialogues has become popular over the last decade, little attention has been paid to the poetic quality of Plato's writing, and the received view of Platonic philosophy still depends on an unpoetic and largely literalist reading of the dialogues. The authors of this volume focus on the text of selected dialogues to identify the thread that unifies each of them from a literary point of view. The conclusions they reach in practicing this kind of reading are diametrically opposed to the largest stream of Platonic scholarship and show the fallacy of important metaphysical, epistemological, political, and ethical positions frequently attributed to Plato. | ||
Reviews | ||
A Beautifully Symphonic & Comic Interpretation At a crucial point in his great Funeral Oration Pericles says something like the following; "We have no need of a Homer or other men of words" to prove the greatness of Athens, which is extraordinarily comic given Pericles' mode of communicating this sentiment---in a speech of thousands of words designed to prove the greatness of Athens.Unfortunately for Pericles, there were men extraordinarily gifted in the use of words, men like Thucydides, Aristophanes and Socrates, who were contemporaries and who left us their own poetic and philosophic understandings of life in Periclean Athens during the Peloponnesian War which did not always harmonize with Pericles' flattering and self-serving depiction. But Socrates' poetry was not inscribed in any book, as was that of Thucydides & Aristophanes. Instead, it seems he wrote it in the souls of his interlocutors, and, if Professors Fendt & Rozema are correct in their analyses, we have the great good fortune that Plato allowed his soul to be so attentive to the character of Socrates that he made it his life's work to poetically recapture the experience of a Socratic dialogue and mimetically preserve it for posterity, allowing us perhaps to understand and experience, centuries later, what a dialogue with Socrates could genuinely do to us, his contemporary interlocutors. Without giving away too much, suffice it to say that the experience is magical and unlike any I've ever experienced before when reading Plato. The dialogues analyzed in the book range from ION, MENO, THEAETETUS & EUTHYPRO to his most extensive works, REPUBLIC and LAWS. And, what is achieved, I think, is an appreciation of Socrates and Plato which is fresh, engaging and transformative; they give us two extraordinary men with no doctrines for sale, men with a simple yet profound ethic which honored life and which responded to the will to truth and not the will to power. The penultimate chapter in the book---entitled PAGAN POLITICS,WAR and the CONSTRUCTION OF NOMOI is a TOUR de FORCE in its penetrating commentary on Plato's LAWS and its relevance to life in a world divided by radically different regimes and tempted by the sophistries of a glib 'Realpolitik'. Further, the emergence of postmodern discourses which revel in our apparent inabilty to find common human standards of judgment is compared to the situation in the LAWS itself where representatives of SPARTA, ATHENS and CRETE, poleis which have warred with each other for more than a generation face the identical political and philosophic problem. Could it be that Socrates and Plato might help us see a way through our linguistic and political impasses? Could they help us learn how we might train our modern & postmodern souls to rise above our easy & glib Hobbessian solutions? Our Machiavellian cynicism? Perhaps. This book was published in 1998; since 9/11 this penultimate chapter seems even more poignant & educative. And, in its final Chapter, the book celebrates the joy and gratitude at the heart of all great philosophy and poetry. Who knows: Perhaps a living philosophy is the real gift of Socrates & Plato. One thing is sure: If PLATONIC ERRORS is any indication, the spirit of Socrates & Plato are alive and well in the souls of Professors Fendt and Rozema, and I thank them for their extraordinary little book. | ||
Plato without the ideological biases This book should be seen as something of a triumph. The authors are two men from a small philosophy department in the midwest, neither of whom is well-known in the circles of Plato scholars. Yet, they have written one of the best treatments of Plato which I have read in the past 10 years. Let it be said that Plato has undergone something of a renaissance in recent times as scholars are now reading Plato's dialogues as dialogues, instead of badly written philosophy textbooks. The only problem is that most of these scholars are still committing the same errors which their positivist brethren had done around mid-century. In other words, they are too quick to assume that Socrates is the sympathetic "hero" of the dialogues and they also dismiss those parts of the dialogues which don't fit their pet theses. Those who call themselves "straussians" are also frequently guilty of importing the concerns of Leo Strauss into their readings. In a marked contrast, Fendt and Rozema treat the dialogues AS dialogues. They don't assume that the dialogues are meant to procure for us a ready-made answer to the problems which are broached within the dialogue. In other words, they believe that Plato means to tell us that philosophy is a constant striving instead of a contented repose. To quote from the last page of the book, "[a]nd since the last argument is not the right answer, or its conclusion does not exactly follow from the argument, the answer is never clearly given in the back of the book, to be remembered for the exam while the rest is forgotten. Any answer must be worked out in thought and worked out in life" (164). What is even more refreshing is that both authors appear to be very familiar with literary criticism (in the best sense of the term) and this informs their readings of the dialogues. They are able to speak cogently about the form of the work as well as the speeches and actions within the dialogues. Furthermore, they read the dialogues with such care that they reveal the assumptions which many other commentators have imported into their readings of Plato. The book itself is a series of essays covering the Ion, Theaetetus, Laws, Euthyphro, Meno, and Republic. There is no "grand thesis" which claims that all of these works represent "plato's theology" or "plato's theory of television ratings." The readings are calm, intelligent, nuanced, spiked with humor and very effective. Though primarily of interest to scholars, I would place this work on par with John Sallis' "Being and Logos", Seth Benardete's "The Being of the Beautiful", and any of Stanley Rosen's commentaries on Plato. It is simply that good. | ||