Platonic Summer Seminar 2021:
Phaedrus / Φαῖδρος
Our goal is to introduce into Platonism, into a specific way of perceiving reality, taken over by Plato from tradition - Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides - and then passed on to later generations through his dialogues and the Academy founded by him. The essence of Platonism as we see it is the change of the soul undergone by the Platonist, the transformation of his self and simultaneously of the world, of the way it is perceived and lived.

In 2018 we dealt with the Republic, in 2019 with the modern reception of Plato, in 2020 with the idea of the Good. This year we will deal with the Phaedrus. We are primarily interested in a detailed study of the dialogue itself: the speech of Lysias, two speeches of Socrates, as well as their subject, Ἔρως. We are interested in the Platonic psychology as presented in them, frenzy and its types (Apollonian, Dionysian, Musical and Erotic), the problem of rhetoric and writing that completes the dialogue, as well as the religious context that permeates all these seemingly unrelated threads. Furtheremore, we will discuss the historical reception of the Phaedrus, from Neoplatonic (Hermias, Plotinus, Proclus), through Renaissance (Ficino), to contemporary (Schleiermacher, Natorp, Heidegger).
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