Amorous and polemical wonder in Plato's dialogues

The following text will analyze, with an attempt of representing multiple mutually opposing views, some of the accounts given in the 20th and early 21st century of two typologically different instances of wonderment in the dialogues of Plato: one occurring at the very beginning of a love experience of Socrates, a different one – during his battle with a sophist. It will argue that the mechanism of this feeling, as found throughout Plato’s writings, was at least partially shaped by the opposition between the Greek verb γίγνεσθαι (to become, to happen, to be born) and εἷναι (to be). That said, Plato tended to associate the surprising with nowness – and avoided the correspondent expressions in relation to ideas – and through it, with the beautiful, that has no prehistory to “now”. This means that the use of the verbs and adjectives expressing wonderment in the dialogues was idiosyncratic, and this idiosyncrasy was targeted at explaining Plato’s understanding of the temporal aspects of the beautiful. The article will also outline the transitions between the instances of non-contextual (genus-related) and contextual (species-related) perception of beautiful objects as one of the ways to approach the Aristotelian critique of Plato's concept of participation in forms

Art · Epistemology · Literature · Wonder · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Philosophy