دانلود کتاب Philosophy as Drama: Plato’s Thinking through Dialogue

Plato’s philosophical dialogues can be seen as his creation of a new genre. Plato borrows from, as well as rejects, earlier and contemporary authors, and he is constantly in conversation with established genres, such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, and rhetoric in a variety of ways. This intertextuality reinforces the relevance of material from other types of literary works, as well as a general knowledge of classical culture in Plato’s time, and the political and moral environment that Plato addressed, when reading his dramatic dialogues.
The authors of Philosophy as Drama show that any interpretation of these works must include the literary and narrative dimensions of each text, as much as serious the attention given to the progression of the argument in each piece. Each dialogue is read on its own merit, and critical comparisons of several dialogues explore the differences and likenesses between them on a dramatic as well as on a logical level. This collection of essays moves debates in Plato scholarship forward when it comes to understanding both particular aspects of Plato’s dialogues and the approach itself. Containing 11 chapters of close readings of individual dialogues, with 2 chapters discussing specific themes running through them, such as music and sensuousness, pleasure, perception, and images, this book displays the range and diversity within Plato’s corpus.
This book contributes to our understanding of Plato by a series of readings of individual dialogues and issues, in a way that combines close attention to the texts with taking seriously their dramatic and literary aspects. In thus focusing on elements related to Plato’s use and development of the dialogue form, this anthology contributes to and continues a strand in Plato scholarship that has been growing in momentum in the past decades.
Among the literary approaches furthered in the volume, the various contributions divide broadly into four different dimensions of Plato’s work. The first, “Genre and philosophical dialogue”, offers reflections on the works’ formal characteristics and their implications. Plato’s use and abuse of established genres, and the texts’ interlocution with other texts before and after Plato, are important features here.
The question of ethical improvement is perhaps the most obvious topic common to all of Plato’s dialogues. A second approach, termed “Virtue and soul-shaping”, accordingly tackles questions of how values are portrayed, communicated, and criticized, sometimes through choice of metaphor, other times by means of something approaching instruction.
Not unrelated to the question of ethical betterment are Plato’s reflections on reason and its place in human life. The section “Reason and irrationality” suitable provides discussions of what we might think of as its various limitations – in relation to culture, pleasure, and forms of irrationality.
Finally, “Place and displacement”, concretizes the relations between place, position, and their absence in some of Plato’s dialogues. The problematic vantage point of philosophy itself is among the topics discussed here.