MARTHA KENDAL WOODRUFFtural mastery displayed in the Phaedo and the Republic; on the other hand, the
formlessness of the work has often been exaggerated” (R. Hackforth, Plato’s Ex-
amination of Pleasure [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945], 10). Mark
Moes, following Robert Brumbaugh’s interpretation of the Republic, suggests
that the Philebus has a symmetrical structure: ABCDE—EDCBA (Mark Moes,
Plato’s Dialogue Form and the Care of the Soul [New York: Peter Lang, 2000], 125).
- The Philebus Commentary, ed. and trans. Michael Allen (Tempe: Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), 72 and 1. - Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato, trans. William Dobson (New York:
Arno, 1973), 309. - Cynthia Hampton, Pleasure, Knowledge, and Being: An Analysis of Plato’s
Philebus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 12. - Cynthia Hampton, “Overcoming Dualism: The Importance of the
Intermediate in Plato’s Philebus,” in Feminist Interpretations of Plato, ed. Nancy
Tuana (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 225n27. - Rosemary Desjardins, Plato and the Good (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 17.
- Translated by Cornford, in Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works.
- When Heidegger writes of the “harshness” (die Härte) of any language
that poses the question of being, he turns to Plato’s Parmenides as a classic ex-
ample (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson [New York: Harper and Row, 1962], 34; Sein und Zeit [Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer, 1953], 39). - Guthrie calls this duality Parmenides’ “familiar weapon, the ‘either-or’
dilemma” (History of Greek Philosophy, 50), and notes that without this ambiguity
in the key terms, the contradictions would not result (55). - Of course, this language still has value as “a series of dialectical ex-
ercises” to train the young philosopher, as Guthrie suggests (History of Greek
Philosophy, 53). - As Benardete puts it, what seems “peculiarly Socratic” in this dialogue
is “the subordination of all cosmological speculation to the issue of the hu-
man good”; but he also rightly notes “the strangeness of the Philebus’s Socr ates”
(Tragedy and Comedy of Life, 89– 90). - Benardete suggests that Protarchus’ request to repeat points “again
and again [eij~ au\qiv~ te kai; au\qi~]” (24e, the passage quoted at the beginning
of this paper) dramatically combines limit and unlimited: “Without their pres-
ent ‘dissonance,’ there would have been no dialogue.... Protarchus chose dis-
sonance when he did not choose mind. He now proposes an unlimited number
of repetitions; he means, presumably, repetitions mixed with rephrasings and
fresh examples” (Tragedy and Comedy of Life, 147). - As Guthrie writes: “By this dramatic device of a dialogue before the dia-
logue Plato shows plainly that he has no intention of treating us to yet another
refutation of the naive hedonistic equation of pleasure and the good.... With
the question ‘what place can be assigned to pleasure in the good life, and what
sorts of pleasures can there fi nd admission?’ he breaks new ground” (History of
Greek Philosophy, 202). - For an overview of such critiques (in Protagoras, Gorgias, Phaedo, and
Republic), see Dorothea Frede, “Disintegration and Restoration: Pleasure and