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Didn't get much out of this one. Can't seem to find a work yet by Plato that I truly adore. Aristotle for me!
That Socrates was one saucy queen. "Why Phaedrus, is that a scroll in your toga, or are you just happy to see me? My dear friend, nothing would please me more than to hear you recite that speech. Sure, let's take a walk to the countryside and discuss love. Don't you find that walking barefoot in the stream is more refreshing?[...] Oh, now, that was one delightful speech. Simply divine. No, no, I couldn't possibly compare...well, if you insist, I guess I'll try (this glade is just full of spirits...
(i only read phaedrus)
Here Plato gets pretty heavily into the philosophy and art of love and rhetoric, in the context of a discussion or "dialogue" between Socrates and Phaedrus about whether a boy is better served by an older man who loves him or doesn't love him and just admits his desire. I'm not going to spend a ton of time raving about Plato because his writing is obviously a foundation of western thought, and this text does nothing to disprove the notion. The letters concern several episodes of Plato's politica...
Phaedrus is a dialogue generally believed to come in the later part of Plato's middle period, possibly being the last dialogue of this period. There are chiefly two things being discussed: Love and rhetoric.There are a few things about this dialogue that struck me as unusual. Firstly, the dialogue takes place outside of the city of Athens surrounded by nature (Plato's dialogues almost invariably take place within the city). This sets us up for the next unusual feature of the dialogue, which is t...
Like some other volumes of Plato, I find myself unable to give this a 'star' rating because the ways of thinking are so alien to me - and, I suspect, to almost anyone alive today - that I can come to no conclusions about them. Clearly, though, it covers some of the same ground as 'The Republic' and 'The Symposium' though, to my mind, it does so in a more readable fashion. And I don't think this is down to the translation, either.
Phaedrus is a dialogue between Phaedrus and Socrates, in which Socrates argues that good rhetoricians need to know the truth of what they're arguing. Rhetoricians who are ignorant of the truth are likely to be misled by their own arguments. (And here I couldn't help but think of Stephen Colbert and truthiness!) For my purposes (discussing orality vs. literacy), the key part of Phaedrus is the last five or six pages, in which Socrates argues that writing is inferior to oral dialogue because oral
Perhaps it is the translation, but this reads surprisingly well. Having done philosophy 40 years ago and dipped into Plato, it is interesting to go back and try to understand which he was so influential. I think it is true to say that the Greeks were the first society to have a written culture, and this perhaps what makes this little volume so persuasive.This is fairly easy to read, the actual Greek is kept to a minimum and restricted to clarification of the choice of alternate key terms such as...
"...men of those days, because they were not wise like you moderns, were content because of their simplicity to listen to oak and rock, provided only that what they said were true; but for you, Phaedrus, perhaps it makes a difference who the speaker is and where he comes from..."The philosophy is strong and metaphysically rigorous, but the best parts are Socrates's strange parables that make him seem completely distempered but nonetheless go entirely unquestioned by the slow-minded Phaedrus.
what strikes me most about this is the way in which plato's sexuality tends to get swept under the rug. i mean, this is ostensibly a dialogue about the power and morality of rhetoric, but it's all takes place through a debate over what kind of lover (i.e. older man) a boy should choose. which brings to mind the close relationship between rhetoric (persuasive speech) and sexuality, on a macro level, like the "debate" over abortion, or a micro level, e.g. your run-of-the-mill drunken seduction...
I read parts of this in college and while some were nodding off to sleep, I found it INCREDIBLY interesting and found that I liked trying to analyze the philosophical dialogues and letters that Plato wrote. I look forward to going back to it one of these days...
The tail end of Plato's Phaedrus is notable for the story of Thamus's rejection of Thoth's gift of writing, a story which gets a lot of play in certain corners of 20th-century theory and philosophy.
'What we talk about when we talk about love,' Plato-style.Turns out we're talking about the relationship our soul had with the heavens, beauty and divine truth before it 'lost its wings' and entered our body. Who knew?
Good story.
Useful.
Socrates' description of the soul of the lover painfully sprouting feathers upon meeting the beloved is one of the most beautiful and erotic passages in western literature.
