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Plato, the Mirror of the World and the Book

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Claude Imbert
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Extract

There is a hint of paradox in opening this collection of texts on the procedures for totalizing knowledge in Antiquity by calling to witness the Platonic dialogues. What might they contribute, besides a critique of Sophistic polymathy, Socrates’ nescience, his way of jumping in and interrupting long discourses, the disconcerting interlude of preliminary questions, and the aporetic collapses? A host of questions does not make a book, much less a library - unless the Socratic stratagem defines some entirely new conditions, or unless Plato's argument authorizes, beyond a program of study, a way of constituting knowledge with its hierarchized elements and the articulations called for by this program. A few remarks are in order here.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 45 , Issue 178 , June 1997 , pp. 7 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

Notes

1. The reader will find herein elements of a lecture given at the conference, Les procédures de totalisation du savoir dans l'Antiquité. The same hypothesis, regarding the unity and the character, as new as it was singular, of the philo sophical and intellectual institutions of Classical and Alexandrian Antiquity, will be developed in Domus aurea, Logique et langage dans le stoïcisme. The method has been presented in Phénoménologies et langues formulaires (1992), particularly in chapters III, VII, XIII.

2. Parmenides, 127e, 128a, 128c: Theaetetus, 143b; Phaedo, 97b-c.

3. Gorgias, 465b 7: "To abridge, I am going to speak to you in the language of geometricians."

4. Anaxagoras, fr. LXII (Diodores of Sicily), and fr. XCI, Seneca and the same Diodores (Dumont, Les Présocratiques, pp. 625, 639).

5. See the double-columned table that compares, on the one side, the produc tions of the gods, including images of trees and mountains reflected on the surface of a lake, and on the other, the productions of men and the images of men (Sophist, 265e-266b).

6. On this last point, see. C. Imbert, "Le dialogue platonicien en quête de son identité," Rhetorica, 1994, no. 4.

7. On this question, see Aristotle, De anima, III, 5. The common sense is "the one that perceives, thinks and says."

8. "Labe to biblion kai lege," Theaetetus, 143c 11.