Browsing by Subject "Love in literature"

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    Love as Recollection in Plato's Symposium
    (2010) LeFrancois, Meghan; Mulligan, Bret
    In Plato's Symposium, the interlocutors take turns giving speeches about love. The careful reader can draw several parallels between love as it is discussed throughout this dialogue and recollection as it is presented in Plato's Meno and Phaedo. According to the recollection thesis, humans have latent, innate knowledge, and throughout our lives, we recollect it, making it explicit and articulate. In the Symposium's culminating speech—that of Socrates—I argue that we learn that love is, in fact, a kind of recollection; we learn that love is the recollection of the form of beauty. In this speech, Socrates argues that love is an ascent. When we love correctly, we complete this ascent, and recollect the form of beauty. When we love incorrectly, we only ascend partially and so we partially recollect; in the process, we give birth not to knowledge, but to ideas. Socrates' speech invites us to reconsider the dialogue's other speeches. I argue that each speech not only shows parallels between love and recollection, but contributes to Socrates' argument that love is a species of recollection. The speeches of Pausanias and Eryximachus, for example, anticipate the distinction Socrates later draws between a correct and an incorrect kind of love. Alicibiades' speech—the only speech after Socrates'—reiterates, in a story, Socrates' argument for love's being a kind of recollection. I argue that this reading of the dialogue supports an interpretation of the recollection thesis according to which not only philosophers, but all humans recollect. Finally, I provide a possible reason that Socrates is the first interlocutor to explicitly mention recollection; perhaps he is the only interlocutor with something like explicit knowledge of what love is.
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    Love Drunk Puppets : on the politics of philosophic erotic reciprocity in Plato’s laws
    (2012) Hays, Paul
    This 2012 master’s thesis argues, contra the previous work of Karl Popper and Gregory Vlastos, that the role of philosophical eros, and love more broadly, in Plato’s political philosophy is worthwhile and beneficial for individual citizens and the social cohesion of the polis. An examination of the functioning of Platonic philosophical eros as suggested in Phaedrus and Symposium reveals that such love is implicated in the creation and exchange of abstract or spiritual goods, specifically virtue in its four types or parts, and that on the macroeconomic level of the polis in Laws the processes of philosophic erotic interaction constitute a spiritual economy. The mutuality or reciprocity of philosophical eros, together with the specific modalities in which a citizen actively practices that eros, create a system similar to what anthropologists call a reciprocity economy, in which productive human interaction is essentially connected to the relationships of the people involved. In Magnesia, the polis in Laws, symposia, choruses, and the laws with their preludes constitute a general economy; the Nocturnal Council and the Ambassadors are put in place to improve and augment the wealth and functioning of the spiritual economy as well as for the distribution of wealth throughout the polis; and the Moderation Tank and other measures are put in place for the benefit of citizens poor in virtue. The argument finds that this political system adopts both the intrinsic and instrumental positive valuation of the other, with which Popper and Vlatos are concerned, insofar as each citizen’s capacity for virtue and philosophic eros is, according to Platonic texts, an innate characteristic of each human being’s divine soul, and each individual positively values, and benefits from, his or her fellow citizens.
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    Πολιτικός Ἔρως: Alcibiades’ love in Thucydides and Plato
    (2013) Olin, Nicholas John
    Throughout Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, erotic language is spoken by the war-time leaders Pericles, in his famous Funeral Oration, and Alcibiades, in his speeches to the Athenians and the Spartans. This language is also present in Thucydides’ discussion of the myth of Harmodius and Aristogeiton. Thucydides’ usage of ἔρως is anomalous for the very reason that the History – a self-styled κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ, a possession unto eternity – is decidedly un-erotic (1.22.3; Wohl 2002, 30). Thucydides, criticizing the romantic stories found in Herodotus, qualifies his investigations thus: ἐς μὲν ἀκρόασιν ἴσως τὸ μὴ μυθῶδες αὐτῶν ἀτερπέστερον φανεῖται, “in a hearing equally their lack of fabulousness will appear unpleasing” (1.22.4). This history then is not an account meant to please, but one meant to instruct “those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future” (1.22.4).