Download or read book The Cratylus of Plato written by Francesco Ademollo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cratylus, one of Plato's most difficult and intriguing dialogues, explores the relations between a name and the thing it names. The questions that arise lead the characters to face a number of major issues: truth and falsehood, relativism, etymology, the possibility of a perfect language, the relation between the investigation of names and that of reality, the Heraclitean flux theory and the Theory of Forms. This full-scale commentary on the Cratylus offers a definitive interpretation of the dialogue. It contains translations of the passages discussed and a line-by-line analysis which deals with textual matters and unravels Plato's dense and subtle arguments, reaching a novel interpretation of some of the dialogue's main themes as well as of many individual passages. The book is intended primarily for graduate students and scholars, in both philosophy and classics, but presupposes no previous acquaintance with the subject and is accessible to undergraduates.
Download or read book Plato s Cratylus written by S. Montgomery Ewegen and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-14 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's dialogue Cratylus focuses on being and human dependence on words, or the essential truths about the human condition. Arguing that comedy is an essential part of Plato's concept of language, S. Montgomery Ewegen asserts that understanding the comedic is key to an understanding of Plato's deeper philosophical intentions. Ewegen shows how Plato's view of language is bound to comedy through words and how, for Plato, philosophy has much in common with playfulness and the ridiculous. By tying words, language, and our often uneasy relationship with them to comedy, Ewegen frames a new reading of this notable Platonic dialogue.
Download or read book Cratylus written by Plato and published by Aeterna Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE Cratylus has always been a source of perplexity to the student of Plato. While in fancy and humour, and perfection of style and metaphysical originality, this dialogue may be ranked with the best of the Platonic writings, there has been an uncertainty about the motive of the piece, which interpreters have hitherto not succeeded in dispelling. We need not suppose that Plato used words in order to conceal his thoughts, or that he would have been unintelligible to an educated contemporary. In the Phaedrus and Euthydemus we also find a difficulty in determining the precise aim of the author. Plato wrote satires in the form of dialogues, and his meaning, like that of other satirical writers, has often slept in the ear of posterity. Aeterna Press
Download or read book Names and Nature in Plato s Cratylus written by Rachel Barney and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2001-08-09 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study offers a ckomprehensive new interpretation of one of Plato's dialogues, the Cratylus. Throughout, the book combines analysis of Plato's arguments with attentiveness to his philosophical method.
Download or read book Socrates and the Sophists written by Plato and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an English translation of four of Plato’s dialogue (Protagoras, Euthydemus, Hippias Major, and Cratylus) that explores the topic of sophistry and philosophy, a key concept at the source of Western thought. Includes notes and an introductory essay. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato’s immediate audience.
Download or read book Plato s Cratylus written by Vladimír Mikeš and published by Brill's Plato Studies. This book was released on 2021-12-02 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume is a collection of papers originally presented at the Eleventh Symposium Platonicum Pragense, held in Prague in November 9th and 10th, 2017. Some dialogues in the corpus of Plato's works have a straightforward importance, position and overall role. The Cratylus is not one of them. In this dialogue Plato touches on questions of longstanding importance to him - as we can conclude from other dialogues - and raises new questions which, given the space dedicated to them, should be worth asking when one is dealing with "correctness of names". And yet there has been wide disagreement about the dialogue's meaning"--
Download or read book Plato s Cratylus written by David Sedley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-11-06 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's Cratylus is a brilliant but enigmatic dialogue. It bears on a topic, the relation of language to knowledge, which has never ceased to be of central philosophical importance, but tackles it in ways which at times look alien to us. In this reappraisal of the dialogue, Professor Sedley argues that the etymologies which take up well over half of it are not an embarrassing lapse or semi-private joke on Plato's part. On the contrary, if taken seriously as they should be, they are the key to understanding both the dialogue itself and Plato's linguistic philosophy more broadly. The book's main argument is so formulated as to be intelligible to readers with no knowledge of Greek, and will have a significant impact both on the study of Plato and on the history of linguistic thought.
Download or read book Proclus Commentary on the Cratylus in Context written by Robbert Maarten van den Berg and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the various views on language and its relation to philosophy in the Platonic tradition by examening the reception of Plato's Cratylus in antiquity in general, and the commentary of the Neoplatonist Proclus in particular.
Download or read book Theophrastus of Eresus Life writings various reports logic physics metaphysics theology mathematics written by Theophrastus and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1998 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume forms part of the large international Theophrastus project started by Brill in 1992 and edited by W.W. Fortenbaugh, R.W. Sharples and D. Gutas . Together with volumes comprising the texts and translations, the commentary volumes provide a new generation of classicists with an up-to-date collection of the fragments and testimonia relating to Theophrastus (c. 370-288/5 B.C), Aristotle's pupil and successor as head of the Lyceum. In the present volume, the focus is on natural philosophy, apart from the study of living things. Topics covered include the principles of scientific enquiry, place, time, motion, the heavens, the sublunary world, meteorology and the study of materials.
Download or read book Plato on the Metaphysical Foundation of Meaning and Truth written by Blake E. Hestir and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-21 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Blake E. Hestir's examination of Plato's conception of truth challenges a long tradition of interpretation in ancient scholarship.
Download or read book Limiting the Arbitrary written by John Earl Joseph and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that some aspects of language are 'natural', while others are arbitrary, artificial or derived, runs all through modern linguistics, from Chomsky's GB theory and Minimalist program and his concept of E- and I-language, to Greenberg's search for linguistic universals, Pinker's views on regular and irregular morphology and the brain, and the markedness-based constraints of Optimality Theory. This book traces the heritage of this linguistic naturalism back to its locus classicus, Plato's dialogue Cratylus. The first half of the book is a detailed examination of the linguistic arguments in the Cratylus. The second half follows three of the dialogue's naturalistic themes through subsequent linguistic history - natural grammar and conventional words, from Aristotle to Pinker; natural dialect and artificial language, from Varro to Chomsky; and invisible hierarchies, from Jakobson to Optimality Theory - in search of a way forward beyond these seductive yet spurious and limiting dichotomies.
Download or read book Plato s Laughter written by Sonja Madeleine Tanner and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato was described as a boor and it was said that he never laughed out loud. Yet his dialogues abound with puns, jokes, and humor. Sonja Madeleine Tanner argues that in Plato's dialogues Socrates plays a comical hero who draws heavily from the tradition of comedy in ancient Greece, but also reforms laughter to be applicable to all persons and truly shaming to none. Socrates introduces a form of self-reflective laughter that encourages, rather than stifles, philosophical inquiry. Laughter in the dialogues—both explicit and implied—suggests a view of human nature as incongruous with ourselves, simultaneously falling short of, and superseding, our own capacities. What emerges is a picture of human nature that bears a striking resemblance to Socrates' own, laughable depiction, one inspired by Dionysus, but one that remains ultimately intractable. The book analyzes specific instances of laughter and the comical from the Apology, Laches, Charmides, Cratylus, Euthydemus, and the Symposium to support this, and to further elucidate the philosophical consequences of recognizing Plato's laughter.
Download or read book Names Reference and Correctness in Plato s Cratylus written by Michael D. Palmer and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1989 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cratylus unfolds as a confrontation between competing theses on the question of the correctness of names. Since Plato levels criticism against both theses, we are led to wonder whether Plato himself takes a position on the main issue. Dr. Palmer argues that we can discern in the Cratylus a positive statement of Plato's own views. Plato, unlike many contemporary theorists who follow Frege, does not presuppose that intensional entities such as concepts or meanings mediate the relation between a name and its nominatum. Plato believes that reality divides into discrete, natural units and that names are established, in part, to mark these non-conventional units. Plato holds (or at least assumes) that a name is correct if it successfully (and directly) picks out a real unit or entity, and if it aptly describes its nominatum.
Download or read book Plato s Progress written by Gilbert Ryle and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1966-01-02 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's Progress deals with scholarly questions of datings and developments, showing and demanding familiarity with a wide literature.
Download or read book Essays on Plato s Epistemology written by Franco Trabattoni and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-21 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Innovating approach to Plato’s philosophy Through a careful survey of several significant Platonic texts, mainly focussing on the nature of knowledge, Essays on Plato’s Epistemology offers the reader a fresh and promising approach to Plato’s philosophy as a whole. From the very earliest reception of Plato’s philosophy, there has been a conflict between a dogmatic and a sceptical interpretation of his work and thought. Moreover, the two sides are often associated, respectively, with a metaphysical and an anti-metaphysical approach. This book, continuing a line of thought that is nowadays strongly present in the secondary literature – and also followed by the author in over thirty years of research –, maintains that a third way of thinking is required. Against the widespread view that an anti-dogmatic philosophy must go together with an anti-metaphysical stance, Trabattoni shows that for Plato, on the contrary, a sober and reasonable assessment of both the powers and limits of human reason relies on a proper metaphysical outlook.
Download or read book Plato and the Elements of Dialogue written by John H. Fritz and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-11-11 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato and the Elements of Dialogue examines Plato’s use of the three necessary elements of dialogue: character, time, and place. By identifying and taking up striking employments of these features from throughout Plato’s work, this book seeks to map their functions and importance. By focusing on the Symposium, Cratylus, and Republic, this book shows three ways that characters can be related to what they do and what they say. Next, the book takes up ‘displacement’ by focusing on the Hippias Major, arguing that individual characters can be expanded by the repeated practice of asking them to consider a question from a point of view other than their own. This ties into the treatments of ‘thinking’ in the Theaetetus and Sophist. The Parmenides, Lysis, and Philebus are examined to come to a better understanding of the functions of the settings (times/places) of Plato’s dialogues, while a reading of the beginning of the of the Phaedo shows how Plato can expand the settings of the dialogues by using ‘frames’ in order to direct his readers. Last, this book takes up the ‘critique of writing’ that closes the Phaedrus.
Download or read book Plato A Very Short Introduction written by Julia Annas and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2003-02-13 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and accessible introduction to Plato focuses on the philosophy and argument of his writings, drawing the reader into Plato's way of doing philosophy, and the general themes of his thinking. This is not a book to leave the reader standing in the outer court of introduction and background information, but leads directly into Plato's argument. It looks at Plato as a thinker grappling with philosophical problems in a variety of ways, rather than a philosopher with a fully worked-out system. It includes a brief account of Plato's life and the various interpretations that have been drawn from the sparse remains of information. It stresses the importance of the founding of the Academy and the conception of philosophy as a subject. Julia Annas discusses Plato's style of writing: his use of the dialogue form, his use of what we today call fiction, and his philosophical transformation of myths. She also looks at his discussions of love and philosophy, his attitude to women, and to homosexual love, explores Plato's claim that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and touches on his arguments for the immortality of the soul and his ideas about the nature of the universe. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.