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This book offers an original interpretation and close reading of Plato’s Phaedo, focusing on the relation between logos and the soul in order to illuminate the ethical and political dimensions of philosophy as “care of the soul.” Jesse I. Bailey argues that the central issue of the dialogue is the relation between logos and the defining activity of the soul. The soul, in accord with logos, gathers the multiplicity of phenomena into the intelligible wholes of experience. This definitive activity also applies to the soul itself, as the soul gathers itself to itself in logos. Ethical living demands the development of a harmonious unity in the self through this activity. Thus, the book argues that the traditional “pillars” of Platonism—the immortality of the soul and the Forms—are presented not as fully-developed theories to be accepted by the reader whole cloth, but rather as provocations for thought.
The concept of the soul, one of the greatest 'inventions' of Greek philosophy, which crossed the whole history of the Western civilisation, was defined in its fundamental philosophical features by Plato. Developing the numerous issues naturally linked to this concept, Plato's thought does not only focus on metaphysical and religious themes, but also to all issues related to spirituality and the human psyche, including their ethical consequences. Therefore, the concept of soul opens the door to an endless process involving the analysis of a subject's interiority. It is not by chance, that this Platonic theme recurs in many texts and even represents the backbone of whole dialogues. In this collection, some of the most important contemporary Platonic scholars looked at these complex philosophical issues from innovative perspectives, especially with regard to texts that previously were either underestimated or largely ignored. This perspective gives the reader a chance to evaluate the hermeneutic power of different approaches and interpretations of Plato's texts, revaluating as well the richness of Plato's contribution to questions that have been received and developed in contemporary philosophical reflections.
The Phaedrus, written by Plato, is a dialogue between Plato's protagonist, Socrates, and Phaedrus, an interlocutor in several dialogues. The Phaedrus was presumably composed around 370 BC, about the same time as Plato's Republic and Symposium.
Recently, in the past thirty years, there has been an upsurge in serious treatment of Platonic mythoi, which were once thought to be only literary decoration and/or the simplistic presentation of philosophic conclusions for the demos (dummies in effect). Nevertheless, the dominant tendency in the exegesis of Platonic mythoi still is to subordinate them to philosophic logos (reason) and not to recognize that such mythoi are philosophic in themselves in the broad sense of “the love of wisdom”. There is something conversional about Plato’s philosophic mythos, reformulating and superseding traditional Greek mythos and then charting the drama of the human soul from Socratic aporia, up and out of the cave, and into the beyond, the Idea of the Good. The late Professor Eric Voegelin understood this existential drama, and his exegesis of Platonic mythos, from engendering pathos to symbols, is revelatory to say the least. My understanding is that logos (reason) is a fundamental and necessary check on mythos, but logos and mythos are complementary via medias; neither are dispensable nor reducible, one to the other. Also crucial to my study of Platonic mythoi is the “analogy of being,” that Voegelin only touches on, but Erich Przywara explores and develops. The relationship between the human and the divine is analogical (likenesses but also significant unlikenesses), and Plato certainly explored the play of opposites and affinities covering the difficult philosophical problems of becoming and being and the temporal and the eternal. Most philosophic commentators on Plato ignore the suffusive presence of the divine in Plato’s love of wisdom. Perhaps only Platonic mythos at its best offers the philosophic imagination the vision of transcendence.
In this book, Kevin Corrigan sheds light on aspects of Plato's thought that are less familiar to contemporary readers. He reveals a Plato who believes in Forms but is not essentialist, who develops a scientific view of perception in the middle and late dialogues, and who offers positive models of art and science. Corrigan shows how Plato articulates a broader view of intelligible reality in which embodiment is affirmative and the mind-soul-body continuum has an eidetic structure, and where even failure and the imperfect are included. He also demonstrates that Plato developed an ideal, yet finely layered view of love that provided a practical guide throughout antiquity; and that the dialogues and unwritten teachings can be understood in a mutually open-ended, non-antagonistic way. Corrigan's book provides a guide to Plato in an unexpected key and poses important questions regarding imagination, divine inspiration, and Forms and the Good, among other topics.
Greek Literature and the Ideal contends that the development of Greek literature was motivated by the need to endow political geography with a sense of purposeful structure. Alexander Kirichenko argues that Greek literature was a crucial factor in the cultural production of space, and Greek geography a crucial factor in the production of literary meaning. The book focuses on the idealizing images that Greek literature created of three spatial patterns of power distribution: a decentralized network of aristocratically governed communities (Archaic Greece); a democratic city controlling an empire (Classical Athens); and a microcosm of Greek culture located on foreign soil, ruled by quasi-divine royals, and populated by immigrants (Ptolemaic Alexandria). Kirichenko draws connections between the formation of these idealizing images and the emergence of such literary modes of meaning making as the authoritative communication of the truth, the dialogic encouragement to search for the truth on one's own, and the abandonment of transcendental goals for the sake of cultural memory and/or aesthetic pleasure. Readings of such canonical Greek authors as Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians, Thucydides, Plato, Callimachus, and Theocritus show that the pragmatics of Greek literature (the sum total of the ideological, cognitive, and emotional effects that it seeks to produce) is, in essence, always a pragmatics of space: there is a strong correlation between the historically conditioned patterns of political geography and the changing mechanisms whereby Greek literature enabled its recipients to make sense of their world.
Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought. The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction-Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative. The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.
In Politics, Money, and Persuasion, distinguished philosopher John Russon offers a new framework for interpreting Plato's The Republic. For Russon, Plato's work is about the distinctive nature of what it is to be a human being and, correspondingly, what is distinctive about the nature of human society. Russon focuses on the realities of our everyday experience to come to profoundly insightful assessments of our human realities: the nature of the city, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of human psychology. Russon's argument concentrates on the ambivalence of logos, which includes reflections on politics and philosophy and their place in human life, how humans have shaped the environment, our interactions with money, the economy, and the pursuit of the good in social and political systems. Politics, Money, and Persuasion offers a deeply personal but also practical kind of philosophical reading of Plato's classic text. It emphasizes the tight connection between the life of city and the life of the soul, demonstrating both the crucial role that human cognitive excellence and psychological health play in political and social life.
This book presents a lively and accessible way to use the ancient figure of Socrates to teach modern psychology that avoids the didactic lecture and sterile textbook. In the online age, is a living teacher even needed? What can college students learn face-to-face from a teacher they cannot learn anywhere else? The answer is what most teachers already seek to do: help students think critically, clearly define concepts, logically reason from premises to conclusions, engage in thoughtful and persuasive communication, and actively engage the franchise of democratic citizenship. But achieving these outcomes requires an intimate, interpersonal learning community. This book presents a plan for using the ancient figure of Socrates and his Method to realize humane learning outcomes in the context of psychology.
Combining the convenience of a dictionary with the depth of a history of philosophy, this new reference book fills a great need and should prove exceedinly useful to all students and scholars in classics, philosophy, theology and linguistics. The book defines and translates key terms used by pre-Christian philosophers up to the time of Proclus, with special references to the writings of the philosophers as they developed nuances and new meanings for the terms. Entries are arranged in dictionary style, but a knowledge of Greek is not necessary to use the book, since an English-Greek index provides the reader with Greek equivalents of English terms, with cross-reference to the main text. Its great value is that it isolates terms and allows the reader to follow their individual careers, while at the same time it offers an evolutionary history of the concept instead of a mere definition.