Introduction Literacy, Dramatic Form, Metaphysics

This chapter summarizes the three major movements in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Plato scholarship that inform the methodology of the book: “orality and literacy” theory to explain the origins of the arts of rhetoric in ancient Greece; Martin Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics to underscore the birth of the distinction between seeming and being; and literary-dramatic interpretation to problematize doctrinal readings of the dialogues. Drawing on the work of Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, Thomas Cole, and others, this chapter argues that orality and literacy theory is essential for understanding the early formation of rhetoric, the first discipline devoted to the self-conscious study of language. Furthermore, despite Martin Heidegger’s controversial reading of the Greeks, his examination of the split of seeming from being in the beginning of Western metaphysics is essential for understanding how Plato used rhetoric to create this distinction in order to defeat the sophists. Finally, literary-dramatic readings of the dialogues problematize the general assumption that Plato simply used Socrates as a mouthpiece for his views, including his unequivocally negative views on rhetoric. These three ways of reading Plato preview how the literate arts of rhetoric capacitated Plato’s split of seeming from being and the development of Western metaphysics.

Art · Dialectic · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Literacy · Literature · Metaphysics · Orality · Rhetoric · Sociology · SOCRATES · The arts · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought