Twyla Gail Gibson

This thesis examines the philosophy of education presented in Plato's dialogues. It dates the composition of these writings to the time of the transition of Greek culture and education from orality to literacy following the adoption of the phonetic alphabet. It shows that an awareness of this revolution in the technology for storing and retrieving communication has not been incorporated into our paradigm for interpreting Plato's philosophy. ;The study takes Homer as an example of a literature with roots in an oral tradition. It explains how poetry functioned as a technology for preserving culture, and how formulas, the sequential ordering of topics, and the geometric ring structure were techniques used by the poets to recite the epics from memory, and by the audience as a guide to reception. ;Applying to Plato an understanding of the principles of the oral traditional style used to structure the verse in Homer allows us to see, in the dialogues, certain characteristic mnemonic patterns that have not been noticed until now. Recognizing the oral patterns in these writings opens the door to a comprehension of the "unwritten doctrine" of principles attributed to Plato by Aristotle, which scholars in the modern era have had difficulty finding in the dialogues. ;The analysis centers on the instructions in Plato's Sophist for drawing the lines that divide the definition of "art" into a sequence of topics, The study shows that this geometry provides the framework for the mnemonic ring composition. The ideas classed in each topic in this definition make up a sequence that recurs in every dialogue. This same series is repeated in Xenophon's Memorabilia and in Aristotle's Poetics. It is also present in the Chuang Tzu and in Genesis 1--3 of the Old Testament. The frequency of the occurrence of this multi-part sequence makes it unlikely that it is either random or accidental. That it turns up in four other ancient works that have been dated to the same time period adds even more weight to the conclusion. These different treatises were all shaped by the techniques and conventions of an oral traditional system of philosophy