Plato's Phaedrus - Graduate Seminar (MT 2024)

Tuesdays, 11am-1pm, Radcliffe Humanities (Ryle Room)

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.