The unity of opposites in Plato's Symposium

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy

Volumn 23, Issue , 2002, Pages 1-60

  Wardy, Robert ^a  

^a St Catharine's College   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 67249124225     PISSN: 02657651     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. See S. Lowenstam, 'Paradoxes in Plato's Symposium' ['Paradoxes'], Ramus, 14 (1984), 85-104 at 88-9 and 96-7, for a good treatment of full/empty, which I do not discuss
2. and M. M. McCabe, Plato and his Predecessors: The Dramatisation of Reason (Cambridge, 2000), especially 'Can the Heraclitean Live his Heracliteanism?' (93-138)
3. For the former tendency: D. Scott, 'Contrasts in the Symposium' ['Contrasts'] (unpublished)
4. for the latter tendency: D. Konstan and E. Young-Bruehl, 'Eryximachus' Speech in the Symposium', Apeiron, 16 (1982), 40-6
5. K. J. Dover, Plato: Symposium, [Symposium] (Cambridge, 1980), 85
6. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff, Plato, Symposium: Translated with Introduction and Notes [Symposium] (Indianapolis, 1989), 6 (emphasis in original)
7. C. J. Rowe, Plato: Symposium: Edited with an Introduction, Translation and Commentary [Symposium] (Warminster, 1998), 23
8. D. Sider, 'Plato's Symposium as Dionysian Festival', Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica, 33 (1980), 41-56, argues that Plato has deliberately shifted the scene from the Lenaia to the city Dionysia
9. (198 A I-3). Implications: Agathon's co-symposiasts do react like an excited theatrical audience (cf. Bloom (Benardete and Bloom, Symposium, 120-1))
10. R. Wardy, The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and their Successors [Rhetoric] (London, 1996), 57-8
11. See the discussion in Wardy, Rhetoric, 25-51
12. Cf. Krüger, Einsicht, 305
13. Belfiore, 'Dialectic', 139-41, argues cogently that 'we should be wary of viewing Diotima as "Reason personified"' (Bury's phrase)
14. See M. Adomėnas, 'Heraclitus on Religion' ['Heraclitus'], Phronesis, 44 (1999), 87-113 at 111-12, for an interesting conjectural attempt to discover hierarchical structures in Heraclitus himself
15. However, see J. Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (London, 1997), esp. 168-72, for a salutary warning against the prevalent assumption that penetration as such was decisive in fixing the sociopolitical consequences of sexual behaviour
16. Cf. A. W. Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy [Genres] (Cambridge 1995), 44-7
17. Cf. Nightingale, Genres, 121-2
18. Pace Lowenstam, 'Paradoxes', 95
19. G. Vlastos, 'The Individual as Object of Love in Plato', in Platonic Studies, 2nd edn. (Princeton 1981), 3-42
20. Scott, 'Contrasts': see also Scott, 'Socrates and Alcibiades in the Symposium', Hermathena, 168 (2000), 25-37
21. Cf. Aristophanes' riposte to the calumny that the eager sexuality of the young masculine types, the (192 A 2), is due to their shamelessncss; this is to confuse lack of shame with bold, manly bravery 192 A 2-5)
22. Pace D. M. Halperin, 'Why is Diotima a Woman?', in Halperin (ed.), One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York, 1990), 113-51: I hope to give this issue the attention it deserves in a separate article
23. F. C. C. Sheffield, 'Psychic Pregnancy and Platonic Epistemology', Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 20 (Summer 2001), 1-33 at nn. 18, 19
24. Cf. Dover, Symposium, 85
25. M. C. Stokes, Plato's Socratic Conversations: Drama ana' Dialectic in Three Dialogues (London, 1986), 114-46, is indeed methodological, but the tack he takes is rather different from mine
26. Cf. Rep. 478 A 12
27. Adomėnas, 'Heraclitus', is an acute and convincing reading of Heraclitus as an instigator of interpretation, with particular reference to cultic practice, but the connections he makes between hermeneutics and the unity of opposites are of wider significance
28. Well spotted by Bury, Symposium, xvii