PLATO AND THE POETS

Banishing the Poets

The main argument of this monograph,* if I understand it rightly (something its rather cloudy writing makes me uncertain of), is that the body of works often (and traditionally) grouped together under the rubric ‘ancient literary criticism’ should be understood not as contributions to aesthetics or criticism of literature as these terms are commonly understood today but rather as political inte...

Plato and Innatism

Plato and Innatism

Plato and Divination

Plato uses the idea of divinatory knowledge as a metaphorical descriptor for a variety of kinds of daytime, waking knowing. What unites these examples is that they all include discussion of a kind of knowing that cannot account for itself, and that is tentative, imagistic and non-discursive. These metaphorical uses can further be illuminated by his more detailed discussion of divinatory knowled...

Reading and Writing Plato

W did Plato write dialogues? How should his dialogues be read (does the literary form matter, for example, to our getting at the heart of what Plato is saying)? These questions are now familiar in contemporary Plato scholarship, and their answers—which undoubtedly are interconnected—are the subject of lively and fascinating exploration. Any doubt that Platonic studies -ourishes would quickly be...