OF PSYCHIC MAIEUTICS AND DIALOGICAL BONDAGE IN PLATO’S
THEAETETUS
- Harrison, “Plato’s Prologue,” 122.
- This not only plays into the engagement with the fi gure of Protagoras,
but also is intimately related to their continual worry about knowledge with
respect to the future. Perhaps more than anything else, it is the inability to
secure judgment about what might happen that undermines the attempts to
say what knowledge itself is. See Theaetetus 166d5 – 168c2, 171d9 – 172c1, 178 a f f.,
and 186a10– b4.
- This is perhaps most clearly seen in the image of the soul as an aviary,
where knowing is taken up in terms of grasping what is known (197b– 200d).
- See Benardete, Being of the Beautiful, 1.149.
- See Francisco J. Gonzalez, “Giving Thought to the Good Together: Vir-
tue in Plato’s Protagoras,” in Retracing the Platonic Text, ed. John Russon and John
Sallis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000), 113– 54, esp. 124– 27.
Gonzalez shows that sunousia establishes a dialogical standard for the discus-
sion of virtue in the Protagoras as well. See also Gorgias 486d4– 487e8 and Phae-
drus 265d5– 10.
- An earlier version of this paper was presented in the Participants’ Con-
ference at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, Città di Castello, Italy, July 13,
- My thanks to those who participated in that discussion for their comments
and criticisms. I would also like to thank Eric Sanday for our ongoing conversa-
tions, which have allowed me to say more than was in me, and Gary Scott for his
efforts in seeing that this volume did not turn out to be a wind-egg.
