Philosophy in Dialogue : Plato's Many Devices

ANNE-MARIE BOWERY

the penultimate draft, and the students in my 2004 and 2005 Plato seminars for
their individual insights and collective philosophical eros.

1. There are some exceptions. See Leo Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium, ed. Seth
   Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Ruby Blondell, The Play
   of Character in Plato’s Dialogues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
   Thomas Szlezák, Reading Plato (New York: Routledge, 1999); Harold Tarrant,
   “Chronology and Narrative Apparatus in Plato’s Dialogues,” Electronic Antiquity
   1, no. 8 (1994), and “Orality and Plato’s Narrative Dialogues,” in Voice into Text,
   ed. I. Worthington (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 129– 47. Some scholars have explored
   the importance of narrative with respect to individual dialogues. See David
   Halperin, “Plato and the Erotics of Narrativity,” in Methods of Interpreting Plato
   and His Dialogues, ed. James C. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith, Oxford Stud-
   ies in Ancient Philosophy supplementary volume (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992),
   93– 129; Kenneth Dorter, Plato’s Phaedo: An Interpretation (Toronto: University
   of Toronto Press, 1982); Patrick Coby, Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment: A
   Commentary on Plato’s Protagoras (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1987);
   Mitchell Miller, Plato’s Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul (University Park:
   Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Catherine Zuckert, “Plato’s Par-
   menides: A Dramatic Reading,” Review of Metaphysics 51 (1998): 875– 906; Alfred
   Geier, Plato’s Erotic Thought: The Tree of the Unknown (Rochester: University of
   Rochester Press, 2002); Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon and
   Schuster, 1993); Thomas Chance, Plato’s Euthydemus: An Analysis of What Is and
   What Is Not Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Claudia
   Baracchi, Of Myth and Life and War in Plato’s Republic (Bloomington and India-
   napolis: Indiana University Press, 2002); and Jacob Howland, The Republic: The
   Odyssey of Philosophy (New York: Twayne, 1993). However, there is no full-scale
   study of Plato’s use of narrative techniques.


2. Harold Tarrant tells us that “an introduction to Plato known to us from
   a papyrus, Oxyrhynchus Papyrus no. 3219... apparently distinguishes ‘nar-
   rated’ from ‘dramatic’ dialogues, and investigates origins of the ‘purely dra-
   matic’ dialogue in fr. 1, accepting that Sophron the mimographer was a literary
   model, but denying that Alexamenos was” (Harold Tarrant, Plato’s First Interpret-
   ers [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000], 6).


3. “Of the thirty-fi ve Platonic dialogues, twenty-fi ve are performed. We can
   say that is the normal case. There is one intermediate case in which we almost
   see a narrated dialogue transformed into a performed one, and that is the The-
   aetetus. Nine are simply narrated” (Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium, 13).


4. According to Malcolm Parkes, “Isidore of Seville (c. 560– 636) could state
   a preference for silent reading which subsequently became established as the
   norm” (Malcolm Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctua-
   tion in the West [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 1).


5. Paul Saenger, Spaces Between Words (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
   1997), 9.


6. Jocelyn Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind (London and New York: Routledge,
   1997), 19.


7. H. Gregor y Snyder, Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World: Philosophers,
   Jews, Christians (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 2.