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Project

Restoring Plato’s sense of dialectic

Scholars often broach Plato’s dialectic from an external perspective. Some believe that while Plato is a superb writer, poet, and creator of inspiring myths that raise intriguing questions, he is definitely not a good logician, especially compared to Aristotle’s breakthrough in logic. Others are more charitable to Plato but still study Plato’s dialectic as if it were an embryonic form of Aristotle’s logic or an important stepping-stone towards Aristotle’s future philosophical achievements. In my project, I plan to study Plato’s dialectic in a way that escapes both kinds of prejudice, in order to show that it is a powerful method (or set of methods) in its own right when read from the perspective of Plato’s own thought and objectives.
My research hypothesis is that a number of key features of Plato’s dialectic that have been criticized by modern scholars can be justified by and better understood through an internal reading of Plato’s philosophy rather than evaluated from an external point of view. My aim is therefore to draw the contours of such an ‘internal’ reading of Plato and to show how it differs from a ‘backwards’ reading of Plato by investigating three notorious cases which should enable me to shed light on the specificity of Plato’s approach, by contrast with Aristotle’s: (a) the conception of science; (b) the use of examples; (c) the lack of use of the qua operator with respect to Forms.
 

Date:1 Oct 2018 →  30 Sep 2021
Keywords:Plato, dialectic
Disciplines:Other philosophy, ethics and religious studies not elsewhere classified, Theory and methodology of philosophy, Philosophy, Ethics