Framing the Dialogues: How to Read Openings and Closures in Plato

Framing the Dialogues: How to Read Openings and Closures in Plato
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2020-12-07
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9004443991

Framing the Dialogues: How to Read Openings and Closures in Plato focuses on the intricate and multifarious ways in which Plato frames his dialogues, with a view to exploring the complex association between framework and philosophical content.

The Gatekeeper: Narrative Voice in Plato's Dialogues

The Gatekeeper: Narrative Voice in Plato's Dialogues
Author: Margalit Finkelberg
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2018-11-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9004390022

In The Gatekeeper: Narrative Voice in Plato’s Dialogues Margalit Finkelberg offers the first narratological analysis of all of Plato’s transmitted dialogues. The book explores the dialogues as works of literary fiction, giving special emphasis to the issue of narrative perspective.

Plato of Athens

Plato of Athens
Author: Robin Waterfield
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2023
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0197564755

This book, the first ever biography of the father of philosophy, tracks Plato's life from his childhood in war-torn Athens at the end of the fifth century BCE to his founding of the Academy, adventures in Sicily, death, and immense legacy. Throughout, it sheds light on Plato's many timeless works of philosophy.

Plato: Republic Book I

Plato: Republic Book I
Author: David Sansone
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2023-09-14
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1108988210

Offers intermediate Greek students a reliable, up-to-date introduction to Plato's most influential work. Plato's Greek is not difficult, but his ideas have generated considerable controversy. Book I serves as a dramatic introduction to them, with its memorable confrontation between Socrates and the sophist Thrasymachus over the nature of justice.

Plato's Political Thought

Plato's Political Thought
Author: John Lombardini
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2023-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004692223

Plato’s political thought continues to be of enduring interest among classicists, philosophers, political theorists, and intellectual historians. The present volume introduces readers to the topic through a survey of important recent trends in the scholarly literature, focusing on challenges to the authenticity of the Seventh Letter; reassessments of the “Socratic Problem”; democratic readings of the Republic; and the rehabilitation of the Statesman and Laws. It provides an overview of the key methodological issues that must be addressed in interpreting the Platonic dialogues, while also suggesting directions for further research.

Plato’s Proto-Narratology

Plato’s Proto-Narratology
Author: Vasileios Liotsakis
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2023-09-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3111307824

Plato’s contribution to narratology has traditionally been traced in his tripartite categorisation of narrative modes we read of in the Republic. Although other aspects of storytelling are also addressed throughout the Platonic oeuvre, such passages are treated as instantaneous flares of metanarrative speculation on Plato’s part and do not seem to contribute to the reconstruction of his ‘theory of narrative’. Vasileios Liotsakis challenges this view and argues that the Statesman, the Timaeus/Critias and the Laws reveal that Plato had consolidated in his mind and compositionally put into effect one systematic mode in which to express his thoughts on narratives. In these dialogues Liotsakis recognizes the birth of a proto-narratology which differs in many respects from what we today expect from a narratological handbook, but still demonstrates two key-features of narratology: (a) a conscious focus on certain aspects of narrativity which are vastly discussed by narratologists and pertain to the structuring and reception of narratives; and (b) a schematised mode of interaction between metanarrative reflections and textual bodies which serve as the paradigms through which to explore the interpretive potential of these reflections.

Sculpture, weaving, and the body in Plato

Sculpture, weaving, and the body in Plato
Author: Zacharoula Petraki
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2023-08-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3111178218

Plato’s Timaeus is unique in Greek Antiquity for presenting the creation of the world as the work of a divine demiurge. The maker bestows order on sensible things and imitates the world of the intellect by using the Forms as models. While the creation-myth of the Timaeus seems unparalleled, this book argues that it is not the first of Plato’s dialogues to use artistic language to articulate the relationship of the objects of the material world to the world of the intellect. The book adopts an interpretative angle that is sensitive to the visual and art-historical developments of Classical Athens to argue that sculpture, revolutionized by the advent of the lost-wax technique for the production of bronze statues, lies at the heart of Plato’s conception of the relation of the human soul and body to the Forms. It shows that, despite the severe criticism of mimēsis in the Republic, Plato’s use of artistic language rests on a positive model of mimēsis. Plato was in fact engaged in a constructive dialogue with material culture and he found in the technical processes and the cultural semantics of sculpture and of the art of weaving a valuable way to conceptualise and communicate complex ideas about humans’ relation to the Forms.

Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama

Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama
Author: Jonathan J. Price
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2020-08-11
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0429656351

This collection presents 19 interconnected studies on the language, history, exegesis, and cultural setting of Greek epic and dramatic poetic texts ("Text") and their afterlives ("Intertext") in Antiquity. Spanning texts from Hittite archives to Homer to Greek tragedy and comedy to Vergil to Celsus, the studies here were all written by friends and colleagues of Margalit Finkelberg who are experts in their particular fields, and who have all been influenced by her work. The papers offer close readings of individual lines and discussion of widespread cultural phenomena. Readers will encounter Hittite precedents to the Homeric poems, characters in ancient epic analysed by modern cognitive theory, the use of Homer in Christian polemic, tragic themes of love and murder, a history of the Sphinx, and more. Text and Intertext in Greek Epic and Drama offers a selection of fascinating essays exploring Greek epic, drama, and their reception and adaption by other ancient authors, and will be of interest to anyone working on Greek literature.

Debating with the Eumenides

Debating with the Eumenides
Author: Vayos Liapis
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2018-07-27
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1527514676

Modern Greek national and cultural identities consist, to a considerable extent, of clusters of cultural memory, shaped by an ongoing dialogue with the classical past. Within this dialogue between modern Greece and classical antiquity, Greek tragedy takes pride of place. In this volume, ten scholars from Cyprus, Greece, the United Kingdom and the United States explore the various ways in which Greek tragedy and tragic myth have been reimagined and rewritten in modern Greek drama and poetry. The book’s extensive coverage includes major modern Greek authors, such as Cavafy, Seferis, and Ritsos, as well as less well-known, but equally rich and rewarding, 20th- and 21st-century texts.