Grace Ledbetter

This chapter argues that, in addition to becoming more powerful and confident as _Oedipus at Colonus_ progresses, Oedipus undergoes an internal process of defining what he views as true about himself and the world. Throughout the play, Oedipus gradually articulates and defends his discovery of himself as a complex and differentiated subject that overcomes the psychological challenges posed by his traumatic past. These challenges include the threats of enduring guilt, shame, alienation, purposelessness, fear of annihilation, and lack of aspiration. The end of the play finds Oedipus a hero in a hard-won state of psychic health, newly absolved and the benefactor of his own rational self-insight and imagination. All in all, the figure and characteristic activity of Oedipus while he is in Colonus can be said to express a therapeutic process that centers on Oedipus’s establishing a complex but ordered picture of his various images of truth and reality.

This thesis first considers a question about Plato's causal terminology, and then turns to particular questions about active causation in the Phaedo and Timaeus. I argue that the terms aitia and aition do not in Plato mark a distinction between propositional and non-propositional items, but do indeed have different ranges of meaning: aitia, but not aition, can refer to someone's reason or ground. I then turn to the Phaedo and argue that Plato is there largely concerned with causal explanation. Teleological and causal explanation are conjoined in that acts of nous are considered both reasons and causes. I argue furthermore that in the "safe" and "more subtle" aitiai, Plato's metaphysical schema fundamentally includes "immanent entities" that are active causes, although they do not have internal sources of motion. I then argue that in the Timaeus, too, teleological and causal explanation are conjoined. The Timaeus, moreover, does not, as it is almost always assumed to, abandon the forms of explanation Plato develops in the Phaedo. On the contrary, in the Timaeus, Plato incorporates the "safe" and "more subtle" aitiai, and maintains the view that immanent entities are active causes. I accordingly challenge the view that the Demiurge is the only active cause in the teleological explanations we find in the Timaeus

‘Unhappy boy, what a deed you have done! What came into your mind? What disaster destroyed your reason?’ This version of 1228–9, by Andrew Brown in his recent commentary, represents the majority opinion. But what ‘deed’ has Haemon done that justifies such an outburst? Jebb, followed by Kamerbeek and Brown, claims that the deed which causes Creon to wail aloud with charges of insanity is Haemon's entry into Antigone's tomb. Kamerbeek and Brown justify the extremity of Creon's reaction by claiming that Creon knows that Haemon intends to kill himself. But is it reasonable to suppose that Creon's first reaction to the shocking scene of Antigone's hanging corpse and Haemon helplessly wailing would be that Haemon is on the verge of killing himself? Creon has not had time to predict his son's actions and his screams of dismay are most naturally read as a reaction to something he sees before his eyes. It would also be strange if Creon had absolutely no reaction to Antigone's death; he expected to find her alive.

Combining literary and philosophical analysis, this study defends an utterly innovative reading of the early history of poetics. It is the first to argue that there is a distinctively Socratic view of poetry and the first to connect the Socratic view of poetry with earlier literary tradition.Literary theory is usually said to begin with Plato's famous critique of poetry in the Republic. Grace Ledbetter challenges this entrenched assumption by arguing that Plato's earlier dialogues Ion, Protagoras, and Apology introduce a distinctively Socratic theory of poetry that responds polemically to traditional poets as rival theorists. Ledbetter tracks the sources of this Socratic response by introducing separate readings of the poetics implicit in the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar. Examining these poets' theories from a new angle that uncovers their literary, rhetorical, and political aims, she demonstrates their decisive influence on Socratic thinking about poetry.The Socratic poetics Ledbetter elucidates focuses not on censorship, but on the interpretation of poetry as a source of moral wisdom. This philosophical approach to interpreting poetry stands at odds with the poets' own theories--and with the Sophists' treatment of poetry. Unlike the Republic's focus on exposing and banishing poetry's irrational and unavoidably corrupting influence, Socrates' theory includes poetry as subject matter for philosophical inquiry within an examined life.Reaching back into what has too long been considered literary theory's prehistory, Ledbetter advances arguments that will redefine how classicists, philosophers, and literary theorists think about Plato's poetics