Friday, September 7, 2012
Plato, Are You Really That Awesome?
Something that always fascinates me every time I read something by Plato for a class is that we never really know if the experiences of the people he speaks of are factual or fiction. I'm not even sure if this question can be answered because Plato lived so long ago, but, did he change up Socrates words to make him seem more right? We do know that Socrates was probably a real person, a student actually of Plato's, but Plato could have easily changed his words in his writings to fit his own agenda. Was Plato really an awesome rhetor (via Socrates) after all, or does his writings just make him seem that way?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Plato was student of Socrates, not the other way around. I think we have to assume, though, that the Socrates in the dialogues is a fictional character based on a real person. It's all "inspired by a true story" in other words, but we know how flexible that can be! That means, more importantly, that we must understand it as a rhetoric creation. (But Aristotle wants to separate out dialectic - like the dialogues - from rhetoric, because dialectic focuses only on a small group of educated people while rhetoric focuses on the masses. We'll pretty much disregard that distinction this semester!)
ReplyDelete