AAP2010 Abstracts


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Title Mr
First Name Bernard
Surname Clarke
Institution Griffith University School of Public Policy
Title of Paper Listening to the cicadas & vice versa: Plato’s Phaedrus on philosophy & writing.
Select a Stream Plato
Abstract G.R.F. Ferrari’s 1987 study of the Phaedrus has demonstrated how “dwelling on the performative and dramatic aspects”, or what he calls “letting the cicadas sing”, or more simply “listening to the cicadas”, provides “a philosophically important caveat on the limitations of the explicit argument in progress—a caveat ignored by most scholars.”(59) A further development of Ferrari’s approach promises commensurate rewards. To take a short example, this is so even in the interpretation of the cicadas passage itself . The digression concerning the cicadas (258e5-259e1) occurs after completion of the famous palinode. That myth enabled Socrates (at 257b) to make the topic of Phaedrus’ (and Lysias’) turn to philosophy into the express topic of the balance of the dialogue. And immediately thereafter (at 257c), the possibility of that turn to philosophy is explicitly linked to the question of writing. Phaedrus in response (at 257d) alludes unmistakeably to the circumstance that Socrates himself does not write. This circumstance threatens to undermine the Socratic exhortation. Socrates’ task is now to deliver a logos that is at once protreptic and apologetic. Since writing and publicity are inextricably linked, Socrates reasonably begins his task by looking at writing in light of the politically most authoritative examples, namely the founders of cities and empires, Lycurgus, Solon, Darius (see 258c2). Phaedrus fails at first to appreciate the delicacy of Socrates’ proposal at 258d to cross-examine the founders in the person of their substitute, the rhetor Lysias. The digression on the cicadas reminds Phaedrus of the delicacy required. Plato’s Phaedrus is an important text both in the history of philosophy and what has been called the sociology of philosophy.