The Reception of Plato’s ›Phaedrus‹ from Antiquity to the Renaissance

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Sylvain Delcomminette, Pieter d'Hoine, Marc-Antoine Gavray
Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, Jul 6, 2020 - Literary Criticism - 292 pages
This volume explores the tremendous influence of Plato’s Phaedrus on the philosophical, religious, scientific and literary discussions in the West. Ranging from Plato’s first readers, over the Church Fathers and the Platonic commentators, to Byzantine and Renaissance thinkers, the papers collected here introduce the reader to the first two millennia of the dialogue’s reception history. Thirteen contributions by both junior and established scholars study the engagement with the Phaedrus by such major figures as Aristotle, Galen, Origen, Clemens of Alexandria, Plotinus, Augustine, Proclus, Psellus, Ficino, Erasmus, and many others. Together, they cover the wide range of topics discussed in the dialogue: the value of myth and allegory, religion and theology, love and beauty, the soul and its immortality, teaching and learning, metaphysics and epistemology, rhetoric and dialectic, as well as the role and the limits of writing. By placing the dialogue in this broad perspective, the volume will appeal to readers interested in the Phaedrus itself, as well as to classicists, literary theorists, and historians of philosophy, science and religion concerned with the dialogue’s reception history and its main protagonists.
 

Contents

Introduction
Teun Tieleman
Alexandra Michalewski
Suzanne SternGillet
Claudio Moreschini
The Fall and the Wings of the Soul
George Karamanolis
Gerd Van Riel
The Lesson of the Phaedrus
The
Lives of the Soul Poetic Forms
The Way of Inspiration
Homer Against Stesichorus
Coping with the Myth
Conclusion
Hermias on the Unity of the Phaedrus

The Phaedrus
Pieter dHoine
The Organic Imagery of Platos Phaedrus
Speech as a Living Being and the skopos of Platos Dialogues
The Divisions of Platos Dialogues
The Dialogue as a Literary Microcosm
The Components of the Dialogue
Platos Justification of Philosophical Writing
Conclusions
Inspired Poetry and Allegory in Proclus
Poetic Inspiration in the Phaedrus
Beauty of Every Kind
Leader of Souls to Beauty
Souls Reversion upon Itself
The Ascent to Divine Beauty
Proclus on the Climax of the Phaedrus 247c6d1
Pantelis Golitsis
Druids Games and A Critique of Language
Bibliography
Index locorum
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About the author (2020)

S. Delcomminette, Université libre de Bruxelles, P. d'Hoine, KU Leuven, M.-A. Gavray, FRS-FNRS / ULiège, Liège, Belgium.

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