Phaedrus

Plato

Softcover

ISBN 10: 151913777X ISBN 13: 9781519137777

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015

The Phaedrus is closely connected with the Symposium, and may be regarded either as introducing or following it. The two Dialogues together contain the whole philosophy of Plato on the nature of love, which in the Republic and in the later writings of Plato is only introduced playfully or as a figure of speech. But in the Phaedrus and Symposium love and philosophy join hands, and one is an aspect of the other. The spiritual and emotional part is elevated into the ideal, to which in the Symposium mankind are described as looking forward, and which in the Phaedrus, as well as in the Phaedo, they are seeking to recover from a former state of existence. Whether the subject of the Dialogue is love or rhetoric, or the union of the two, or the relation of philosophy to love and to art in general, and to the human soul, will be hereafter considered. And perhaps we may arrive at some conclusion such as the following—that the dialogue is not strictly confined to a single subject, but passes from one to another with the natural freedom of conversation.

About the Author:

Plato (c. 428 BC - c. 348 BC) was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens. Along with his teacher, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science.