When Plato in the 10th and final book of the Republic distances himself from other forms of art, it is their mimetic character he presents as the foundation of his argument. Nonetheless, Plato’s own dialogues also rely heavily on mimetic elements, and there is reason to believe that he has more than one reason for placing his newly established genre at a higher level than he accords other genres and forms of art. Our present project will analyze this problem from several perspectives.
Vigdis Songe-Møller’s project will take a closer look at the arguments Plato uses in Republic X for banning the tragedies from his ideal state. It is Songe-Møller´s hypothesis that the Platonic search for immortality is the basic reason for distancing himself from the genre of tragedy, not only in the Republic, but in other dialogues as well. For instance, Plato argues that the tragedies, in their dwelling upon calamities, death and grief, provide nourishment for the lower parts of the soul and therefore corrupt its immortal element. Plato´s argument that tragedies, as any other kind of art, are “third removed from truth” because of their mimetic aspect, will be shown to be, not only of less importance, but also inconsistent with Plato´s own concept of philosophy. The analysis of Plato´s critique of the arts will focus on the following dichotomous pairs of concepts: death and immortality, emotions and reason, memory and forgetting. On the basis of this analysis, Songe-Møller will examine selected tragedies, such as Antigone and Electra by Sophocles, and look at the role played by the very same concepts. The analyses will place the Platonic dialogues and the tragedies within the political context at the time, i.e. within the democratic ideology of the city state of Athens. Insofar as all of the above mentioned concepts are central for the way sexual difference was understood, the interrelationship between the feminine/masculine on the one hand and death/immortality, emotions/reason, memory/forgetting on the other, will be analysed.
In her project, Cynthia Freeland will argue that the late Platonic dialogue Philebus follows up the attack on poetry in Republic X. She will engage in a close study Philebus 37a-50d, which contains Socrates’s notorious argument that there are “false pleasures”. Part of Plato’s argument in Philebus involves the claim that pleasures always involve judgments. He seems to believe that false judgments contaminate not just the knowledge claim associated with the believer’s epistemic condition but also their psychological state: that is, even if someone has pleasure when imagining winning the lottery (although that won´t actually occur), that pleasure is itself “false”. Good people will be blessed with true and only true pleasures.
Plato links the discussion of imagining false pleasures in the Philebus with a discussion of an audience’s pleasure at the imagined scenes of a comedy or a tragedy. His critique of these forms of entertainment as “mere” images or imitations in Republic X is relevant for helping us understand how a good person can avoid being drawn into any sort of false imaginings, whether about fictional characters or about him- or herself. Plato’s discussion of false pleasure in the Philebus, then, is of broader interest for the clues it affords us about his theory of art, imagination, and virtue, and about how these all require commitment to the truth rather than to images. Freeland hopes to show how Plato’s discussion bears on contemporary debate in philosophy of art about the nature of our involvement with fictional characters.
The literary-philosophical function of Republic 1 is the working title of Hayden Ausland´s project. Today's understanding of Plato continues to labor under the influence of an older view that the Republic's first book is at best loosely connected with the rest of the work. Key among the governing assumptions is a conception of philosophy as a systematic discipline, which expects a doctrinal coherence with the rest of the work. More recent literary approaches to reading Plato's dialogues offer encouraging prospects, but an adequate understanding of the unity of the Republic remains elusive. For this reason it is important to seek germane principles for explaining numerous literary peculiarities distinctive of the Republic's opening book.
Book 1 is surely in some sense detachable from the remainder of the Republic, since even Socrates at first thinks the conversation complete at its end. But he later designates it metaphorically as the following discussion's musical or rhetorical prelude. Ancient technical principles teach that a sketchy relevance is required of rhetorical and musical proems, and, while these themes must be presented already within such preludes, they are to be there only in a seminal, or condensed form.
Republic 1 functions as one among Plato's lesser 'Socratic' dialogues, but it is a unique member of the genre. It alone among them has a particular theme - not only literary context - that necessarily ties it to a comprehensive political inquiry. A close reading of its literary imagery and dramatic details viewed reveals that Republic 1 contains a philosophical drama designed so as to anticipate mimetically all the principal themes to be developed philosophically within Books 2-10, and that it in this way functions as the work's prelude in a manner simultaneously poetical and philosophical.