Understanding Plato The Symposium Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Understanding Plato The Symposium book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
Understanding Plato: The Symposium by Hercules Bantas Pdf
This concise, essay length guide examines Plato's discussion of love in The Symposium. It covers all the speeches, culminating in Alcibiades's drunken homage to Socrates, and examines the moral dimensions Plato attaches to love, as well as key concepts such as Common and Heavenly Love.
Author : Richard L. Hunter Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand Page : 165 pages File Size : 44,8 Mb Release : 2004 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines ISBN : 9780195160802
The Symposium is Plato's best-known work. It is now a seminal text, not just for the representation of Socrates, Plato's ontology, and for the history of ideas about desire, but for Athenian social and political history, the history of rhetoric, and for the image of the intellectual in Western tradition. It is also a high point in classical literary art. This book pays close attention to parody of modes of style and thought as well as to the provocative construction of the whole. It will introduce readers to the work itself by contextualizing it in Greek literature in general and the Platonic.
In many regards the dialectical counterpart of the Republic, the Symposium is one of the richest and most influential of the Platonic dialogues, resonating not only with Western philosophy, but also with literature art and theology. While Plato ostensibly dramatizes a humorous account of a drinking party, he presents a profoundly serious explication of Eros that challenges the limits of reason, the nature of gender, identity and narrative form. Plato's Symposium: A Reader's Guide presents a concise and accessible introduction to the text, offering invaluable guidance on: - Historical, literary and philosophical context - Key themes - Reading the text - Reception and influence - Further reading
The Symposium is considered a dialogue - a form used by Plato in more than thirty works - but in fact it is predominantly a series of essay-like speeches from differing points of view. So dialogue plays a smaller role in the Symposium than it does in Plato's other dialogues. With dialogue, Socrates is renowned for his dialectic, which is his ability to ask questions that encourage others to think deeply about what they care about, and articulate their ideas. In the Symposium the dialectic exists among the speeches: in seeing how the ideas conflict from speech-to-speech, and in the effort to resolve the contradictions and see the philosophy that underlies them all.It is important to understand that the Symposium is, like all of Plato's dialogues, fiction. The characters and the settings are to some degree based on history, but they are not reports of events that actually occurred or words that were actually spoken. There is no reason to think they were not composed entirely by Plato. The reader, understanding that Plato was not governed by the historical record, can read the Symposium, and ask why the author, Plato, arranged the story the way he did, and what he meant by including the various aspects of setting, composition, characters, and theme, etc.For a very long time it was widely believed that Socrates was presented in the dialogues by his admiring disciple, Plato, as an ideal philosopher and ideal human being. It was thought that what Socrates said was what Plato agreed with or approved of. Then in the late 20th Century another interpretation began to challenge that idea. This new idea considers that the Symposium is intended to criticize Socrates, and his philosophy, and to reject certain aspects of his behavior. It also considers that Socratic philosophy may have lost touch with the actual individual as it devoted itself to abstract principles.One critic, James Arieti, considers that the Symposium resembles a drama, with emotional and dramatic events occurring especially when Alcibiades crashes the banquet. Arieti suggests that it should be studied more as a drama, with a focus on character and actions, and less as an exploration of philosophical ideas. This suggests that the characters speak, as in a play, not as the author, but as themselves. This theory, Arieti has found, reveals how much each of the speakers of the Symposium resembles the god, Eros, that they each are describing. It may be Plato's point to suggest that when humankind talks about god, they are drawn towards creating that god in their own image.Andrew Dalby considers the opening pages of the Symposium the best depiction in any ancient Greek source of the way texts are transmitted by oral tradition without writing. It shows how an oral text may have no simple origin, and how it can be passed along by repeated tellings, and by different narrators, and how it can be sometimes verified, and sometimes corrupted. The story of the symposium is being told by Apollodorus to his friend. Apollodorus was not himself at the banquet, but he heard the story from Aristodemus, a man who was there. Also, Apollodorus was able to confirm parts of the story with Socrates himself, who was one of the speakers at the banquet. A story that Socrates narrates, when it is his turn to speak, was told to Socrates by a woman named Diotima, a philosopher and a priestess.
Plato, Allan Bloom wrote, is "the most erotic of philosophers," and his Symposium is one of the greatest works on the nature of love ever written. This new edition brings together the English translation of the renowned Plato scholar and translator, Seth Benardete, with two illuminating commentaries on it: Benardete's "On Plato's Symposium" and Allan Bloom's provocative essay, "The Ladder of Love." In the Symposium, Plato recounts a drinking party following an evening meal, where the guests include the poet Aristophanes, the drunken Alcibiades, and, of course, the wise Socrates. The revelers give their views on the timeless topics of love and desire, all the while addressing many of the major themes of Platonic philosophy: the relationship of philosophy and poetry, the good, and the beautiful.
This new edition of Plato's Symposium provides beginning readers and scholars alike with a solid, reliable translation that is both faithful to the original text and accessible to contemporary readers. In addition, the volume offers a number of aids to help the reader make his or her way through this remarkable work: A concise introduction sets the scene, conveys the tenor of the dialogue, and introduces the reader to the main characters with a gloss on their backgrounds and a comment on their roles in the dialogue. It also provides a list of basic points for readers to keep in mind as they read the work. A thought-provoking interpretive essay offers reflections on the themes of the dialogue, focusing especially on the dialogue as drama. A select bibliography points to works, both classic and contemporary, that are especially relevant to readers of the Symposium. Two appendices consist of a line drawing that depicts the spacial layout and positioning of characters in the Symposium, and a chart that shows the relation of the first six speeches to number, age, parentage and the function of Eros.
Of all the works of Plato the Symposium is the most perfect in form, and may be truly thought to contain more than any commentator has ever dreamed of; or, as Goethe said of one of his own writings, more than the author himself knew. For in philosophy as in prophecy glimpses of the future may often be conveyed in words which could hardly have been understood or interpreted at the time when they were uttered (compare Symp.)--which were wiser than the writer of them meant, and could not have been expressed by him if he had been interrogated about them.
The Symposium is a philosophical text by Plato dated c. 385–380 BC. It concerns itself at one level with the genesis, purpose and nature of love, and (in latter-day interpretations) is the origin of the concept of Platonic love
Excerpt: ...sort is there any disgrace in being deceived, but in every other case there is equal disgrace in being or not being deceived. For he who is gracious to his lover under the impression that he is rich, and is disappointed of his gains because he turns out to be poor, is disgraced all the same: for he has done his best to show that he would give himself up to any one's 'uses base' for the sake of money; but this is not honourable. And on the same principle he who gives himself to a lover because he is a good man, and in the hope that he will be improved by his company, shows himself to be virtuous, even though the object of his affection turn out to be a villain, and to have no virtue; and if he is deceived he has committed a noble error. For he has proved that for his part he will do anything for anybody with a view to virtue and improvement, than which there can be nothing nobler. Thus noble in every case is the acceptance of another for the sake of virtue. This is that love which is the love of the heavenly godess, and is heavenly, and of great price to individuals and cities, making the lover and the beloved alike eager in the work of their own improvement. But all other loves are the offspring of the other, who is the common goddess. To you, Phaedrus, I offer this my contribution in praise of love, which is as good as I could make extempore. Pausanias came to a pause
Leo Strauss On Plato's Symposium by Leo Strauss Pdf
The first major piece of unpublished work by Leo Strauss to appear in more than thirty years, Leo Strauss On Plato's "Symposium" offers the public the unprecedented experience of encountering this renowned scholar as his students did. Given as a course in autumn 1959 under the title "Plato's Political Philosophy," at the University of Chicago, these transcripts previously had circulated in samizdat fashion, passed down from one generation of students to the next. They show Strauss at his best, in his subtle and sometimes indirect style of analysis, which has attracted almost as much commentary as has the content of his thought. Strauss presents a coherent and complete interpretation of the Symposium, proceeding by a meticulous reading from beginning to end. Operating on the once common hypothesis that commentary is an excellent method of expounding the truth, Strauss sheds light not only on the meaning of the dialogue and its place in the Platonic corpus, but also on a host of important topics, including the nature of eros and its place in the overall economy of human life; the perennial quarrel between poetry and philosophy, and the relation of both to piety, politics, and morality; the character of Socrates and the questions of his trial; and many other matters. As provocative as they were a half century ago, these important lectures will be welcomed by students of classics, philosophy, politics, psychology, and political philosophy.
The Symposium (Ancient Greek: S?μp's ) is a philosophical dialogue written Plato sometime after 385 BC. It is a discussion on the nature of love, taking the form of a group of speeches, both satirical...
