Lydia W. Barry

This paper attends philosophically to Sappho’s fragments 16, 31, and 58 to explore the interplay of beauty, eros, and mortality in Sapphic poetry. It argues that Sappho portrays beauty as inseparable from temporality, vulnerability, and embodied eros. Through attending to these fragments, the paper offers a Sapphic portrait of beauty as an alternative to the idealizing, linear model of desire often associated with Diotima’s ladder in Plato’s Symposium: beauty is not a static form toward which to ascend, but a lived experience disclosed in particular, finite encounters. Fr. 16 portrays eros itself as beautiful and bound to desire for particular others. Fr. 31 connects beauty to the human condition of desire and vulnerability. Finally, Fr. 58 emphasizes beauty’s ephemerality. If Platonic metaphysics aims at the beautiful itself, Sappho reminds us that each concrete experience of desire is not merely a stepping-stone but a site of profound meaning in its own right.

This article explores Socrates' long analysis of Simonides' "Ode to Scopas," found near the end of Plato's Protagoras. Socrates misinterprets the poem to suggest that virtue is akin to technical knowledge, whereas the poem suggests instead that a wholly virtuous life is impossible, and that the good life is divine, achievable only by the gods. The author argues that Socrates' exegesis dialectically opposes the idea that virtue is knowledge, along with his suggestion that the good life can be secured through a hedonistic calculus, with the poem's emphasis on the insurmountable limitations to human flourishing. Socrates' misreading highlights the provisional and aporetic nature of philosophical accounts of virtue, suggesting that continuous inquiry in the face of misfortune is constitutive of human goodness. The article concludes by proposing that philosophical speech must be self-disclosive and poetic, indicating its own limitations, while engaging in a dialogical pursuit of truth.

Plato’s Gorgias concerns the tension between political and philosophical power. In it, Socrates and Gorgias discuss rhetoric’s power, which Gorgias claims is universal, containing all powers, enabling the rhetorician to rule over others politically. Polus and Callicles develop Gorgias’s understanding of rhetoric’s universal power. Scholars addressing power’s central focus rightly distinguish Socrates’ notion of philosophical power from Gorgias’s. However, these authors make this distinction too severe, overlooking the kinship between philosophy and politics. This paper argues that Socrates’ notion of power has its origins in Gorgias’s, but instead of seeking to persuade others, philosophy primarily concerns self-persuasion.