Jill Gordon

Some scholars read the black body as constructed by white consciousness or perceptions; Coates indicates, to the contrary, that violence against the black body and threats to black embodiment ground and make possible particular ideations of race and (white) American self-concepts. Coates takes an implicitly anti-Hegelian, anti-DuBoisian stance against any spirit or history that might redeem or affirm the black body as the grounding of black experience. Like repeated speech-acts, bodily violence is “world creating.” Although material treatment of bodies and their conceptual signification are mutually reinforcing, Coates’s reversal of etiology signals a material foundation to concepts of race and to solutions to racial injustices. Only through the end of violence to the black body might white Americans change their ideation and achieve racial justice.

This chapter demonstrates that the Seventh Letter, explicitly and throughout its entirety, thematizes hearing and listening, and it comprises an exhortation to listen well. After laying down groundwork showing that logos must include listening, not merely assertion or expression, the chapter first demonstrates the political significance of the exhortation to listen based on a unified reading of the Letter that conjoins the concerns of the so-called digression with the rest of its content. It situates the “weakness of logos” taken up in the digression, which most scholars treat in an ontological-linguistic weakness, as an aural phenomenon within the Letter’s distinctly political aims. That is to say, the “weakness of logos,” referred to in the so-called digression is also a weakness of hearers and hearing and is thus a political weakness, as well. The chapter then goes on to argue that the politics of listening in the Seventh Letter, as well as in some aspects of Socratic dialectic, rely necessarily on certain forms of domination or compelled listening, and I therefore consider the links between hearing and tyranny in the Letter. Finally, I speculate on what a more liberated politics of listening and hearing might look like and what role the Platonic writings might play as a propaedeutic to better listening in the city. I conclude by arguing that because of the “weakness of logos,” Plato’s task is inherently paradoxical: Plato calls us to hear what we are not yet able to hear, tyrannizing in order to liberate our sense of hearing.

Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece represents the first comprehensive study of the role of sound and hearing in the ancient Greek world. While our modern western culture is almost an entirely visual one, hearing and sound were central to ancient Greeks. The fifteen chapters of this edited volume explore "hearing" as being philosophically significant across numerous texts and figures in ancient Greek philosophy. Through close analysis of the philosophy of such figures as Heraclitus, Sophocles, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, Hearing, Sound, and Auditory in Ancient Greece presents new and unique research from philosophers and classicists that aims to redirect us to the ways in which sound, hearing, music, listening, voice, and even silence shaped and reflected the worldview of ancient Greece.

Ahrensdorf’s interpretation of the Phaedo leaves few stones unturned. While other scholars have pointed to the fallibility of Socrates’ “proofs” for the immortality of the soul, or have sought to distinguish the primary interlocutors, Simmias and Cebes, or have examined this dialogue’s vindication of the philosophical life, Ahrensdorf manages to pull all these issues together in a coherent, holistic reading of the Phaedo. The dialogue, he argues, presents Socrates’ views that the individual soul is not immortal and that our embodied human existence is the place where the philosophical life is lived out, not some transcendent reality in which perfect wisdom exists. “In the Phaedo, then, Socrates indicates, albeit quietly, that, in his view, the philosophical life is the best way of life, not because of the rewards the divine soul of the philosopher will enjoy in Hades, but rather because of the happiness the philosopher enjoys, as a human being, in this life”.

For Plato scholars who work within the Anglo-American or analytic tradition, Hyland’s book provides an accessible exposition and a balanced assessment of major texts. So, if one is not familiar, for example, with what Heidegger or Derrida say about Plato’s dialogues, this is an excellent starting place. For scholars who already work in the “continental” tradition, Hyland’s book provides incisive criticism of the major texts and a constructive argument for why these figures’s interpretations of Plato are in tension with their own hermeneutic principles.

Plato's entire fictive world is permeated with philosophical concern for Eros, well beyond the so-called erotic dialogues. Several metaphysical, epistemological and cosmological conversations - Timaeus, Cratylus, Parmenides, Theaetetus and Phaedo - demonstrate that Eros lies at the root of the human condition and that properly guided Eros is the essence of a life well lived. This book presents a holistic vision of Eros, beginning with the presence of Eros at the origin of the cosmos and the human soul, surveying four types of human self-cultivation aimed at good guidance of Eros and concluding with human death as a return to our origins. The book challenges conventional wisdom regarding the 'erotic dialogues' and demonstrates that Plato's world is erotic from beginning to end: the human soul is primordially erotic and the well-cultivated erotic soul can best remember and return to its origins, its lifelong erotic desire.

The expression "the marketplace of ideas" is often used in reference to Mill's views on freedom of thought and speech in On Liberty, but the metaphor does not come from Mill's work, nor is it consistent with his position. A real marketplace of ideas would create what Mill warns us against: the prevalence of the views of the most powerful and/or the most numerous. From a U.S. perspective, I explore Mill's suggestion to "countenance and encourage" minority views, and I compare Mill's particular type of liberalism with contemporary U.S. advocacy of market models for our political lives

Acknowledging the powerful impact that Plato's dialogues have had on readers, Jill Gordon shows how the literary techniques Plato used function philosophically to engage readers in doing philosophy and attracting them toward the philosophical life. The picture of philosophical activity emerging from the dialogues, as thus interpreted, is a complex process involving vision, insight, and emotion basic to the human condition rather than a resort to pure reason as an escape from it. Since the literary features of Plato's writing are what draw the reader into philosophy, the book becomes an argument for the union of philosophy and literature—and against their disciplinary bifurcation—in the dialogues. Gordon construes the relationship of Plato's text to its audience as an analogue of Socrates' relationship with his interlocutors in the dialogues, seeing both as fundamentally dialectic. On this insight she builds her detailed analysis of specific literary devices in chapters on dramatic form, character development, irony, and image-making. In this way Gordon views Plato as not at all the enemy of the poets and image-makers that previous interpreters have depicted. Rather, Gordon concludes that Plato understands the power of words and images quite well. Since they, and not logico-deductive argumentation, are the appropriate means for engaging human beings, he uses them to great effect and with a sensitive understanding of human psychology, wary of their possible corrupting influences but ultimately willing to harness their power for philosophical ends

Several of Plato's dialogues seem to question the moral and epistemic value of image-making. Yet Plato's own word-images are powerful and alluring. I reconsider a conception of "Platonic" metaphysics in which the visible is denigrated relative to the purely intelligible, and in which only the latter can be an avenue to philosophical enlightenment. Viewing the apparent criticisms of image-making in the context of Plato's own use of images, I argue that his use of images can and does lead to philosophical enlightenment and that images are necessary, in addition to logico-deductive reasoning, because of human limitation.

The Timaeus, a decidedly non-erotic dialogue, provides surprising philosophical insight into the role and importance of eros in human life. Contrary to manytraditional readings of the dialogue, the Timaeus indicates that eros is an original part of the disembodied soul as created by the demiurge, and as such, is part of the noetic or intelligent design of the cosmos. Timaeus reveals, furthermore, that eros is the moving force behind our desire to know first causes and the noetic world, that eros, like the senses and emotions, needs to be trained and guided toward its proper objects, and that eros is distinct from appetitive desires in the mortal soul.