10. Agathon, Pausanias and Diotima in Plato’s Symposium: Paiderastia and Philosophia Luc Brisson My goal in this contribution [1] is to shift the center of interest of Plato’s magnificent dialogue the Symposium on two points. First, by showing that the dialogue develops a critique of a specific form of education within […]

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9. The Virtues of Platonic Love Gabriela Roxana Carone Socrates’ speech on Love in the Symposium (201–212), reporting his conversation with the Mantinean priest Diotima, stands as prima facie counterintuitive. First, it is not clear that it has anything to say about interpersonal love at all; and even if it […]

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8. Tragedy Off-Stage Debra Nails Plato weaves strands of the tragic and the comic, high seriousness and low bawdiness, into his Symposium; that much is uncontroversial. If someone should miss the sweep of the plot from the celebration of Agathon’s prize for tragedy to the waves of drunken revelers, the kômos, […]

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7. Where is Socrates on the “Ladder of Love”? Ruby Blondell On the Road “Where is [Socrates]?” Agathon asks Aristodemus, when the latter shows up at his house a couple of pages into Plato’s Symposium (174c12). Later Alcibiades tacitly likens Socrates to Odysseus (220c), the archetypal wanderer, thus obliquely […]

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6. A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium C. D. C. Reeve [1] Agathon’s drinking-party has reached its philosophical apogee in Socrates’ vivid, Diotima-inspired description of the ultimate object of all love and desire, the Platonic form of beauty—the beautiful itself. All of a sudden, there is a commotion […]

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5. Permanent Beauty and Becoming Happy in Plato’s Symposium Gabriel Richardson Lear [1] Our first encounter with Socrates in the Symposium is bizarre. Aristodemus, surprised to run into Socrates fully bathed and with his sandals on, asks him where he is going “to have made himself so beautiful (kalos)” (174a4, […]

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4. Medicine, Magic, and Religion in Plato’s Symposium Mark L. McPherran If you [Eryximachus] show me that you know me better than I do myself, and can foresee even my next mood, … must I not conclude that my whole effort is puerile, that my intimate tactics vanish in […]

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3. A Platonic Reading of Plato’s Symposium Lloyd P. Gerson 1. The American poet and critic John Jay Chapman (1862–1933) wrote, … to the historical student, to the man who not only knows something of books, but something of the world, the Symposium of Plato is seen to have […]

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Two: The Role of the Earlier Speeches in the Symposium: Plato’s Endoxic Method? Frisbee C. C. Sheffield [1] It is well known that there are deep and important differences between Plato and Aristotle. One of these concerns the status and role of endoxa in philosophical inquiry. Although Aristotle appears to […]

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1. The Symposium as a Socratic Dialogue Christopher Rowe This essay will make one very specific claim: that the Symposium is properly to be treated as a Socratic dialogue. In one way it will of course be quite uncontroversial to describe the Symposium as “Socratic”: Socrates is on any account the […]

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