Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Theoretical issues
- 3 Some Presocratics
- 4 The sophists and their contemporaries
- 5 The Protagoras: Platonic myth in the making
- 6 The range of Platonic myth
- 7 Plato: myth and the soul
- 8 Plato: myth and theory
- 9 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
8 - Plato: myth and theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Theoretical issues
- 3 Some Presocratics
- 4 The sophists and their contemporaries
- 5 The Protagoras: Platonic myth in the making
- 6 The range of Platonic myth
- 7 Plato: myth and the soul
- 8 Plato: myth and theory
- 9 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
Summary
The analysis of the previous chapter suggested that myth in the middle dialogues expresses a synoptic view of reality. Myth extrapolates from the particulars of philosophical discussion and produces a narrative we might call ‘collective’ (or ‘recollective’). The philosopher's devotion to dialectic and to the examination of the grounds of his knowledge renders him capable of an intuitive leap to a vision of the soul separated from its body and related to the whole. The mythological vision is a self-qualifying image of the truth expressed in narrative. This intuitive understanding cannot stand by itself, however; it arose in the first place from dialectic and must return to dialectic to ground itself.
This final chapter on Plato will examine how the treatment of myth in the late dialogues takes this vision in a different direction. This is not to say that synoptic myths do not occur in the late period. The cosmologies of the Statesman and the Timaeus are universalising, albeit incomplete, accounts of the world from a transcendental perspective. Nevertheless, the relationship of these accounts to the context of the dialogue in which they are set differs from the middle period. Instead of being a philosophically intuitive leap, they are firmly integrated into a framework of analytic method and methodology. Thus the cosmology of the Timaeus is an exercise in structured scientific and philosophical inference, while the cosmology of the Statesman is intended to help clarify a potential error in the dialectic process.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato , pp. 242 - 289Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000