Tuesdays, Spring 2020
Dial-in back-up for connection disruptions: +61 3 7018 2005 or +61 2 8015 6011 | Meeting ID: 985 1333 0262 | Password: 996988
Course outline and weekly readings
Loeb Classical Library Greek/English edition of Phaedrus (PDF)
Catch-up videos
Session 1
Session 2
Session 3
Session 4
Mentioned in Session 4 was Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Volume II: The Use of Pleasure was published just after he died in 1984. It covers ancient Greece, and makes extensive use of Plato.
Also mentioned (and to be discussed more in the next two sessions) is ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ (in Dissemination ; pdf) by another modern French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. This essay analysis Plato’s Phaedrus with specially interest in Plato’s use of the word pharmakon. His critique of the Socratic case for speech over writing effects a sceptical critique of Plato’s very theory of forms and introduces the method of scepticism known as ‘Deconstruction‘.
Session 5
Who would not wish to be so inspired by those Socratic frenzies which Plato sings in the Phaedrus that, swiftly fleeing this place, that is, this world fixed in evil, by the oars, so to say, both of feet and wings, he might reach the heavenly Jerusalem by the swiftest course? Let us be driven, Oh Fathers, by those Socratic frenzies which lift us to such ecstasy that our intellects and
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486) by Pico della Mirandola,
our very selves are united to God.
“The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.”
Meister Eckhart