Tuesdays, 11am–1pm, Radcliffe Humanities (Ryle Room)
Convened by Prof Dominic Scott
In this seminar we shall work through Plato’s Phaedrus. Attention will be given to reading the dialogue as a whole, with due regard to its literary as well as its philosophical aspects. Topics to be discussed include:
- The unity of the dialogue—does it have a central, organising theme, e.g. love, rhetoric, or education?)
- Philosophical madness
- Recollection and forms
- The critique of writing
Although the focus is on a single dialogue, I shall also be drawing comparisons on specific themes with other dialogues, especially:
The philosophy of love, especially the value of the individual as the object of love (Symposium)
Moral Psychology—the divided soul (Republic)
Rhetoric (Gorgias)
I shall also discuss the place of the Phaedrus in the Platonic corpus: some features seem to connect it to the middle period dialogues (Phaedo, Symposium and Republic), others to the later period (especially in its discussion of philosophical method: collection and division).
As a translation of the Phaedrus, I shall mainly be using:
- Nehamas, A. and Woodruff, P. (1995) Plato's Phaedrus. Indianapolis (Hackett edition), which has a very useful introduction.
