398. Experimental Course
Plato Seminar
Though Plato did not coin the term philosophy, the love of wisdom, he contributed decisively to its meaning by separating philosophy from all other endeavors. In doing so, he made repeated and problematic appeals to Ancient Greek conceptions of sexuality, gender, and divinity while also seeking to transform these categories. Sexual imagery and reproductive language convey his understanding of philosophical inquiry and discovery, while the ultimate aim of philosophy was to "become like god." This seminar seeks to examine Plato's success in marking out the boundaries of the domain of philosophy and to evaluate the stakes of his appeal to the categories of the feminine and the divine. We will begin with Plato's effort to distinguish philosophy from sophistry, dialectic from rhetoric; we turn next to examine his conception of the ideal philosophical life and the nature and place of same-sex attachment therein; and we end with a study of the ethical aim of philosophy, assimilation to the divine. In addition to reading a number of Platonic dialogues in their entirety and parts of several others, we will carefully examine a growing secondary literature that raises questions about Plato and the history of philosophy from feminist and queer theoretical perspectives.