Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy (Jun 2010)
The Wonder of Humanity in Plato’s Dialogues
Abstract
One way of coming to terms with Platonic wonder is to examine what types of things in the dialogues elicit the pathos in the first place. My primary goal in this paper is to examine what evokes the wonder of Socrates and his interlocutors in a number of these works, and I will pay particularly close attention to what Plato has to say about the wondrous nature of humanity itself. I will show that Plato depicts Socrates and other characters found in the dialogues, such as the young Theaetetus, as not only wonderers of the first rank, but also true wonders in themselves.
