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The prefaces of Cicero’s late dialogues indicate that they share a pedagogic function with the philosophical practices of the Hellenistic Academy. In the first part of this chapter, we give a few examples showing how the late dialogues serve this end, and use them to argue that Cicero’s texts systematically enact, as well as represent, an Academic pedagogical methodology. In the second part of the chapter, we use these results to propose that Cicero’s earlier, “Platonic,” dialogues are equally sophisticated in the modes through which they effect Academic aims concerning philosophical education. As starting points for further inquiry, we indicate a few of the devices the early dialogues employ to prompt the reader to reflect on her job as a philosophical critic.
Plato's account of the tripartite soul is a memorable feature of dialogues like the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus: it is one of his most famous and influential yet least understood theories. It presents human nature as both essentially multiple and diverse - and yet somehow also one - divided into a fully human 'rational' part, a lion-like 'spirited part' and an 'appetitive' part likened to a many-headed beast. How these parts interact, how exactly each shapes our agency and how they are affected by phenomena like erôs and education is complicated and controversial. The essays in this book investigate how the theory evolves over the whole of Plato's work, including the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus, and how it was developed further by important Platonists such as Galen, Plutarch and Plotinus. They will be of interest to a wide audience in philosophy and classics.
This chapter compares the accounts of the nature, aims, and activity of erôs in the Symposium and the Phaedrus and assesses the evidence for the impact of tripartition. Unlike the Phaedrus, the Symposium contains very little about the nature of the soul. Socrates argues that the desire for good things and happiness manifests itself in creative activity in the presence of beauty because this is the distinctively mortal way in which one can achieve a share of happiness. Desiring agents are distinguished in the Symposium not by being dominated by a distinctive part of the soul, but by different specifications of the good central to the happy life, and in the different ways in which they try to secure that good. The Symposium is concerned to explore the role of erôs in the good life, and each speaker is to praise erôs.