Brill’s Companion To The Reception Of Plato In Antiquity | Bill's
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Author: Bill's
Added by: carlosdam01
Added Date: 2021-07-01
Publication Date: 2018
Language: spa
Subjects: Philosophy
Collections: folkscanomy philosophy, folkscanomy, additional collections
Pages Count: 300
PPI Count: 300
PDF Count: 1
Total Size: 339.25 MB
PDF Size: 3.45 MB
Extensions: pdf, gz, html, zip, torrent
License: Public Domain Mark 1.0
Downloads: 269
Views: 319
Total Files: 15
Media Type: texts
Description
Despite Socrates’ infamous criticism of written text in the Phaedrus (275a–e),
Plato’s enduring fame and legacy certainly pivots upon the illustrious beauty
and wisdom found in the dialogues. Born early in the disastrous Peloponnesian
War (431–404 BCE), Plato witnessed many of his compatriots losing their lives,
or like Alcibiades wasting their lives, in their quest for everlasting glory. In contrast
to such pitiful pursuits
of ambition,
individuals
like
Thucydides and
Plato
1
sought to be remembered by their literary pursuits, with the historian explicitly desiring his writings
to be a
“resource for all
time”.
2
Similarly, Plato suggests
in the Symposium through the character of Diotima that there were numerous
ways of attaining greatness or “immortality” (208c–209e), one of which explicitly endorsed the
verse
of Homer or Hesiod, the
legal institutions
of Solon,
or other serious types
of
writing.
For
Plato, such
“progeny” could bring
longer-
lasting
credit upon their
“parents” than successful
generations
of
children and
grandchildren.
Committing
oneself
to the
(re)production
of ideas
was the
real
way
to
live
on,
because
in
such
productions
one
comes
into
contact,
or
gives
birth
to, a beauty that
was
more enduring than the
finite beauty
of the
body.
Heeding
this,
Plato must
have
wondered about the
reception
of his
literary
progeny
by
future
generations. Did he
anticipate that his dialogues alongside
the poems
of Homer or the
chronicles
of
Thucydides
would
survive so
successfully
into our
culture that one might
believe or hope they
always
will?
