Journal of the History of Philosophy

Plato's Dialectic at Play succeeds in demonstrating what many scholars suspect, but find difficult to prove. Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan show that one cannot simply take the words of Socrates as the meaning of a given dialogue. They persuasively argue that one must consider a Platonic dialogue as a whole if one hopes to understand it. They accomplish this by a careful analysis of the structure, characters and arguments of the target dialogue, both in its own right and together with books 6–7 of the Republic. The result is a compelling and careful interpretation of the Symposium.

Professors Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan argue that philosophers should take the entire Symposium seriously, since much of its import, both philosophical and literary, lies in the structure of the whole and the relation of the parts. They are attentive to the dramatic details and structural peculiarities that mark the dialogue and yet they state a desire to avoid the "infernal dyad of reading too much and too little into them" (68). Many authors make similar claims, but Plato's Dialectic at Play makes a serious effort to consider what is worth serious study and what is not. The attempt is, largely, successful and the authors steer between the argumentative austerity of some scholars and the myth-making tendency of others. Most refreshingly, the authors offer a sensitive discussion of the "criteria for judgment" of a detail's significance (23–25). Thus they can choose which dramatic details and episodes are philosophically important.

Their reading covers the dramatic details of the prologue, but places more weight on the structure of the dialogue as a whole. The discussion of this structure ends up resting largely upon the ordering of the speeches. The authors are reacting to what they see as a "considerable critical consensus that these speeches are an inferior backdrop to the Socrates-Diotima discourse" (43). The critical consensus might not be as considerable as the authors claim, but the several related discussions of the structural interactions of the speeches are highpoints of the book. Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan argue that each of the speeches is related to a character-type and to the over-all structure of the dialogue as represented in the "ladder of love" in the Socrates-Diotima speech. They claim that "when character-type and speech are juxtaposed and set against the image of the lovers' ascent that transfixes the dialogue as a whole, what emerges is not at all a showcase of philosophically unsuccessful speeches or a catalogue of inferior minds but much more a dialectic of strikingly complex structure, which simultaneously presents a series of problematic images and a comic-tragic document of the epoch preceding the trial and death of Socrates" (50).

The authors proceed to argue that "Socrates' speech, then, overthrows, comments on, and reshapes every major point in the earlier speeches" (159) so that each of the speeches corresponds in an organic way to its own transformation in a stage of ascent described in Diotima's speech.

Finally, Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan argue that the "Symposium dramatizes the dialectic of the Republic" (213). They claim that the Symposium as a whole is the dramatic enactment of dialectic at play in the precise sense this is indicated toward the end of Republic 7" (213–14). Specifically, they argue that the Symposium is a "complex dramatization . . . of the [End Page 117] play of 'children' in whose apparently thoughtless games the material of dialectic is already unconsciously present, waiting to be jolted into the structure of philosophical conversation" (204). This is the book's most important point. The authors remind us that Plato knew that it was the job of philosophy to understand the 'prephilosophical' world. This, Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan argue, is the true subject of the Symposium.

Though Corrigan and Glazov-Corrigan claim that the Symposium is the first novel, their treatment of the historical...