I’ve never seen a thread on Platonic secondary literature, but I love finding new, good commentators...

I’ve never seen a thread on Platonic secondary literature, but I love finding new, good commentators. List’em and discuss if you want. John Sallis’ work on Plato and phenomenology has changed the way I think almost as much as Plato’s work itself. Being and Logos is what I started out with, and I have been collecting and re-reading his books since I realized how brilliant he is. I just finished reading Being and Logos for the sixth time and I learn so many new things each time through it. He recently put out a work on the statesman that I haven’t been able to afford yet. There are a lot of other commentators that have helped me out, but for brevity’s sake I’ll only list Heidegger as the second most helpful. His work on the Sophist and Parmenides is a chore to plow through, but I feel as though it is well worth reading until what he writes is understood. The thread might die from lack of interest, but I wanted to see if anyone was looking for this type of discussion.

Other urls found in this thread:

n1.xtek.gr/ime/lyceum/index.php?p=lemma&id=867&lang=2
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Can you give examples of how reading these secondary sources has helped you? I've been re-reading Plato for a while now and I really don't see the point in reading a secondary source.

I’ll try: there are a ton of subtleties in the dialogues that cannot be reached by reading the translations, and many more that hypothetically could be noticed with the translations, but are not. Also, the implications of Plato’s arguments are drawn out by Sallis to an extent that I could never do on my own which gives clarity and depth to the ideas that make them so much more valuable to me than they were when I was just reading the dialogues. Recently, I have gotten a lot out of discussions about ‘showing’ and how something shows itself in an image, (the lowest and least real reality in the four-part line analogy in the republic) as compared with the way that something in the artifact portion of the line (the next-to-least real portion of the line). In the image, the idea is shown through its negativity (the shadows on the wall), so there is no rest and constant motion in this type of showing, whereas in the artifact, the thing shows itself in its positive aspects, allowing the senses to rest upon recognizing the thing (which is useful insofar as this rest compares to the rest that is achieved in the knowledge portion of the line), honestly, the shit is super dense and impossible to summarize in a useful way here, but I read the dialogues a lot of times before encountering Sallis, and I realize now that I didn’t appreciate the meaning of the works for even 20% of what they actually are before I began appreciating them through the lense of good secondary literature

Plato uses a lot of cool rhetorical techniques that sometimes leave the reader unsure as to what are the most important ideas in a discussion and what should be taken from each discussion. The dialogues were just part of the teachings, they introduced concepts to students, but much of the explanation was left to the oral instructions, the teachings that we don’t have any more, that interpreted the sometimes-intentionally cryptic dialogues. John Sallis, Heidegger, and others provide us with a supplement for that portion that we lack, a part of the Platonic school that is complementary and almost necessary to the dialogues.

this post is so bad

Pretend I'm an idiot because clearly I am due to me not understanding anything from your image and from your explanation that seemed to go from the four-part line to the allegory of the cave: is there any way you can give me a real clear example of one of these rhetorical techniques or subtleties? I think you're onto something when you say this stuff is really dense.

I agree, but it makes sense in the context that can’t, or shouldn’t, be squeezed into a blurb. That’s why they make Books. I was trying to be specific, because that is what was requested, but it doesn’t work to put a tiny piece of a complex system on display.

you couldn’t even vaguely articulate yourself, you wrote 5 sentences too many and the picture is embarassing. fuck you

I think this is one that is clear out of context: in the Republic, when Socrates takes on the 3 ‘waves’ (I think around Book 5 or 6) which are three big objections to the argument at hand, the word used for ‘wave’ (something like ‘tokos’) is also the word for fetus, making an allusion to the midwifery that is central to Socrates’ imagery elsewhere (Theaetetus and elsewhere). This works parallel with testing a conception (in the double sense of the word) to see if it is a ‘wind-egg’ or a legitimate birth (theaetetus), but in the republic, the waves challenge Socrates’ city to test it and find out if it is a legitimate birth of a city in the soul or not. Very fucking subtle, but helps the reader connect the concepts that run throughout the dialogues

There were only 4 sentences because they were run-on sentences. I think the use of ‘vaguely articulate’ there is kind of funny because you clearly meant ‘articulate effectively’ but you used ‘vaguely’, which actually doesn’t make sense in its relationship with articulation there, so your attempt to identify my poor articulation failed because of your inability to articulate your ideas

Thank you.

take your tongue, extend it out as far as you can into the space in front of you. Now, find a chair of some height or a table that’s at least 3 feet off the ground; climb up on top of the seat of the chair or onto the surface of the table top with both feet. When you’ve summited your chosen furniture, i want you, with the tongue still extended, to jump as high and as far as you can away from the furniture with the tongue remaining extended. You should find a marvelous occurrence stemming from these actions, and most importantly should you have any luck at all, your mouth will be filled with blood and the organ that was your tongue should be some form of mangled tissue and fiber which has rendered you mute. Your insipid, grasping attempts to articulate the utility or meaning of a secondary philosophical text, coupled with an image which is rotated improperly upon its axis, along with being too zoomed out to make sense of its contents in a way that does not strain the viewers eyes so as to make them unwilling to humor your faggot ideas, is the equivalent of the situation you will have found yourself in. This of course assuming my articulation of the said analogy to your incapability to express your ideas, is not in itself enough to illustrate the stupidity of your post and the 15 year old, high school student pseud response you’ve given me.

If you desire to speak on behalf of others, which you clearly do, like many pseuds, you should do others the good favor of being informative, precise and well spoken. Additionally, being well versed enough in the matter at hand is of great importance should someone press you for the necessity of attaining the knowledge you yourself purport to have derived from the text or ideas you are foisting upon your interlocutors or audience. Is this clear my dear user?

If you need further instruction I am quite confident, possibly even certain, that you could simply follow the careful procedure i’ve laid out for you. Doing so would likely give the same understanding as merely comprehending the analogy as opposed to taking the incredible leap to actually act out its contents as if they had been delivered as literal commands. Do I make myself clear to you my dear user?

I love you

Nukka, if you just point out a sentence in the post that you can’t make sense of, I will go into greater depth, but any person with a legitimate understanding of Plato’s ideas would be able to connect the dots between the concepts I addressed in that post. Is it negativity (images showing an idea as that which it is not) that troubles you? It is taken on in at least 4 dialogues. Is it the line you don’t understand? Is it the concept of motion with regard to grasping an ‘idea’? Seriously, point to a sentence you can’t understand and I will explain it in such a way that you will be able to make sense of it. These are not obscure, unfounded concepts, they are ideas that are central ideas in Platonic philosophy. I can’t prove it but I wrote a 100+ page masters thesis on middle Platonism. Sometimes it is hard for me to know what is likely to be included in the average reader’s background, so it is hard to understand me. Sure I didn’t explain that post well. This was sort of intentional to provide evidence that there is a lot of substance in secondary literature. Good post. I mean it.

I also love you

You know, this wouldn't be that bad of a post if you filtered out the passive voice. Spoken English prefers to use the verb "to be" with a past participle, especially in the present tense, but in written English it is superfluous. Notice where you have two verbs: "be reached", "be noticed", "are drawn out", "is shown", and on. Who reaches, who notices, what shows? Usually you answer this with a prepositional phrase, which clouts your sentences even more.

I'm explaining (and using the passive voice, it's actually quite useful to make a sentence conversational) this basic, high school English rule because in philosophy we deal with abstract concepts. Physical objects tend to belong to certain verbs, more often than not, but abstract concepts can do anything you want them to, and so when you write philosophically in the passive voice, you scramble the clarity of your thought more than you would writing about anything else.

Besides this, I notice that after I study a particular school or figure for a while, I tend to lose myself in their ideas. By this I mean that I tend to confront the problems they address in the context of that school or figure's other concepts. So when you discuss Plato's ladder of being, or his ideas about showing, you seem to talk about them in relation to other concepts that in your course of study clarify each other for you, but for someone outside this course, you need to ground the concepts in the problems they address. I would recommend doing this for yourself. Any understanding of a thinker you can reach will mean nothing if your need the context of that thinker's tradition and scholarship.

I wrote this reply because I saw the posts that other guy made, and I thought you'd like to understand why your writing repulsed him so much. I mean, be assured, that guy is a jackass, but he hates what you've written because it shows two weaknesses: passive voice and context dependency. These two weaknesses appear constantly in academic writing, so be wary. And when you're done with Plato, read some Thucydides.

Ya my professors said the same thing about passive voice... I don’t know why my thinking operates that way by default. Tough to kick it and still sound authentic, lucid. Thanks for the advice, I really appreciate it and it is all very accurate. Anything in particular I should look for in Thucydides? I’m genuinely interested

I got slammed a lot for my writing in my second year of university. But then I discovered that just because I thought in passive doesn't mean I have to write in passive. In other words, I found the real use of refining and editing my prose. The benefit here is that I translate my own little solipisistic thoughts into something real and universally understandable.

wew

You make good points but people can pull off passive voice very well.

Spoken English almost always uses the passive voice, so most English speakers find it more natural, only because it is more conversational. Nothing inheres in your mind that makes you use it, besides habit. You might find it easier to write first drafts with it, but I find that when you purge it from a draft, it forces you to clarify the relationships between the agent, object, and action. Once you make the switch, you can write with much more severity and accuracy. The best style handbook that I found about this is Christopher Lasch's "Plain Style". He includes and essay by Randolph Bourne called "College Life To-day". If you don't read the handbook, read the essay. It's very quick, very severe, and very natural to American ears.

I recommend Thucydides because he contrasts so well with Plato. Seeing Plato's opposite in Greek culture helped me understand the width and variety of intellectual projects in ancient Greece. Plato is the ur-idealist, and Thucydides the realist. But more than that, Thucydides represents the height of Sophist learning, with their relative epistemology, and Plato fights so fiercely against that tradition that he banished Sophistic thinkers from their rightful place as the beginning of western philosophy. Both combine every kind of culture that the Greeks developed, like dramatic theater, historical and mythological research, and oration, but both towards different ends. Thucydides wants to critique the historians, which in Greek means curators. He wants history to do more than curate sources, because he believes, along with the Sophists, that an account given from a single standpoint or perspective is incomplete. Plato wants philosophy to do more than give perspective, he wants it to reach truth that every standpoint must admit. Nietzsche recommends Thucydides as a cure for idealism, and I know many philosophy professors and religious leaders that would recommend Plato as a cure for realism. Take them both and see what happens.

Could you show me some examples? I think it could work in fiction, especially in first person narratives, but in non-fiction I find it very obstructive. Especially abstract language, I've found, needs active voice.

Wonderful insight. I think some contrast to Platonism would be healthy for me, so I appreciate the suggestion. Thank you

>I think some contrast to Platonism would be healthy for me
For me too. I'm too idealistic.

INFP type.

Thanks.

The Other Plato: The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato's Inner-Academic Teachings

Leo Strauss -- On Plato's Symposium

Laurence Lampert -- How Philosophy Became Socratic: A Study of Plato's "Protagoras," "Charmides," and "Republic"

Stanley Rosen -- Plato's Republic: A Study

n1.xtek.gr/ime/lyceum/index.php?p=lemma&id=867&lang=2

"Who being in his right senses could doubt that to Plato justly belongs the palm of theology? Where is a work more sublime than the whole Parmenides, one that is wiser, one that is more divine?"

- Basilios Bessarion, Platonis I.7, p. 73, translated and quoted in Raymond Klibansky, Plato's Parmenides in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: a Chapter in the History of Platonic Studies, 1905, p.31