Platonic Dialogues (platonic + dialogue)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Platonic Dialogue, Maieutic Method and Critical Thinking

JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, Issue 3 2007
FIONA LEIGH
In this paper I offer a reading of one of Plato's later works, the Sophist, that reveals it to be informed by principles comparable on the face of it with those that have emerged recently in the field of critical thinking. As a development of the famous Socratic method of his teacher, I argue, Plato deployed his own pedagogical method, a ,mid-wifely' or ,maieutic' method, in the Sophist. In contrast to the Socratic method, the sole aim of this method is not to disabuse the reader or learner of her false opinions. Rather, its purpose is to supply her with the skills and dispositions as well as the claims and counter-claims she needs to critically evaluate a view, and so facilitate knowledge acquisition, for herself. But the text does not merely teach critical thinking in this indirect manner. One of the strategies its author employed was to encourage the reader/learner to consider under what conditions a claim or idea would be false. To the extent that it achieves this, the Sophist provides both a model and an application of that particular kind of critical thinking in the learning environment that Jonathan Baron has described as ,active open-mindedness'. [source]


Theistic Ethics and the Euthyphro Dilemma

JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS, Issue 1 2002
Richard Joyce
It is widely believed that the Divine Command Theory is untenable due to the Euthyphro Dilemma. This article first examines the Platonic dialogue of that name, and shows that Socrates's reasoning is faulty. Second, the dilemma in the form in which many contemporary philosophers accept it is examined in detail, and this reasoning is also shown to be deficient. This is not to say, however, that the Divine Command Theory is true,merely that one popular argument for rejecting it is unsound. Finally some brief thoughts are presented concerning where the real problems lie for the theory. [source]


The Unacknowledged Socrates in the Works of Luce Irigaray

HYPATIA, Issue 2 2006
SHAUN O'DWYER
In Luce Irigaray's thought, Socrates is a marginal figure compared to Plato or Hegel. However, she does identify the Socratic dialectical position as that of a ,phallocrat' and she does conflate Socratic and Platonic philosophy in her psychoanalytic reading of Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman. In this essay, I critically interpret both Irigaray's own texts and the Platonic dialogues in order to argue that: (1) the Socratic dialectical position is not ,phallocratic' by Irigaray's own understanding of the term; (2) that Socratic (early Platonic) philosophy should not be conflated with the mature Platonic metaphysics Irigaray criticizes; and (3) that Socratic dialectical method is similar in some respects with the dialectical method of Diotima, Socrates' instructress in love and the subject of Irigaray's "Sorcerer Love" essay in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. [source]


The Place Of Geometry: Heidegger's Mathematical Excursus On Aristotle

THE HEYTHROP JOURNAL, Issue 3 2001
Stuart Elden
,The Place of Geometry' discusses the excursus on mathematics from Heidegger's 1924,25 lecture course on Platonic dialogues, which has been published as Volume 19 of the Gesamtausgabe as Plato's Sophist, as a starting point for an examination of geometry in Euclid, Aristotle and Descartes. One of the crucial points Heidegger makes is that in Aristotle there is a fundamental difference between arithmetic and geometry, because the mode of their connection is different. The units of geometry are positioned, the units of arithmetic unpositioned. Following Heidegger's claim that the Greeks had no word for space, and David Lachterman's assertion that there is no term corresponding to or translatable as ,space' in Euclid's Elements, I examine when the term ,space' was introduced into Western thought. Descartes is central to understanding this shift, because his understanding of extension based in terms of mathematical co-ordinates is a radical break with Greek thought. Not only does this introduce this word ,space' but, by conceiving of geometrical lines and shapes in terms of numerical co-ordinates, which can be divided, it turns something that is positioned into unpositioned. Geometric problems can be reduced to equations, the length (i.e, quantity) of lines: a problem of number. The continuum of geometry is transformed into a form of arithmetic. Geometry loses position just as the Greek notion of ,place' is transformed into the modern notion of space. [source]