David Wolfsdorf

Trials of Reason

Plato and the Crafting of Philosophy

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The study focuses on a set of fourteen so-called early dialogues, beginning with a methodological framework that explains how to integrate the argumentation and the drama in these texts. Unlike most canonical philosophical works, the early dialogues do not merely express the results of the practice of philosophy. Rather, they dramatize philosophy as a kind of motivation, the desire for knowledge of goodness. They dramatize philosophy as a discursive practice, motivated by this desire and ideally governed by reason. And they dramatize the trials to which desire and reason are subject, that is, the difficulties of realizing philosophy as a form of motivation, a practice, and an epistemic achievement. In short, Trials of Reason argues that Plato's early dialogues are as much works of meta-philosophy as philosophy itself.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press, USA
• Seitenzahl: 296
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. Januar 2008
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 236mm x 157mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 544g
• ISBN-13: 9780195327328
• ISBN-10: 0195327322
• Artikelnr.: 23570732

Autorenporträt

David Wolfsdorf received a doctorate in Classics from the University of Chicago in 1997. He currently teaches in the Philosophy Department at Temple University where he specializes in Ancient Greek philosophy.

Inhaltsangabe

INTERPRETATION:
Introduction;
Interpreting Plato;
The Political Culture of Plato's Early Dialogues;
Dialogue;
Character and History;
The Mouthpiece Principle;
Forms of Evidence
DESIRE:
Socrates as an Erotic Figure;
The Subjectivist Conception of Desire;
Instrumental and Irrational Desires;
Desire in the Critique of Akrasia;
Interpreting Lysis;
The Deficiency Conception of Desire;
Inathentic Friendship;
The Three-Dimensional Conception of Desire;
Anti-Philosophical Desires
KNOWLEDGE:
Excellence as Wisdom;
The Epistemic Unity of Excellence;
Dunamis and Techne;
Goodness and Form;
The Epistemological Priority of Definitional Knowledge;
Ordinary Ethical Knowledge
METHOD:
The Socratic Fallacy;
Socrates' Pursuit of Definitions;
Hupothesis; Two Postulates;
The Geometrical Illustration;
Geometrical Analysis;
The Method of Reassuring from a Postulate;
Elenchus and Hupothesis;
Knowledge and Aitia;
F-conditions;
Cognitive Security
APORIA:
Forms of Aporia;
Dramatic Aporia;
The Example of Charmides;
Charmides as Autobiography;
The Politics of Sophrosune;
Critias' Philotimia;
Self-Knowledge and the Knowledge of Knowledge;
Knowledge of Knowledge and Knowledge of the Good Philosophy in the Polis
APPENDICES:
List of Commonly Used Greek Words;
The Irony of Socrates
BIBLIOGRAPHY