Socrates on friendship and community : reflections on Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis

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Bibliographic Information

Socrates on friendship and community : reflections on Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis

Mary P. Nichols

Cambridge University Press, 2009

  • : hardback

Available at  / 8 libraries

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Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Contents of Works

  • The problem of Socrates : Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
  • Kierkegaard : Socrates vs. the God
  • Nietzsche : call for an artistic Socrates
  • Plato's Socrates
  • Love, generation, and political community (the Symposium)
  • The prologue
  • Phaedrus' praise of nobility
  • Pausanias' praise of law
  • Eryximachus' praise of art
  • Aristophanic comedy
  • Tragic victory
  • Socrates' turn
  • Socrates' prophetess and the daemonic
  • Love as generative
  • Alcibiades' dramatic entrance
  • Alcibiades' images of socrates
  • Alcibiades' praise of Socrates' virtues
  • Aftermath
  • The incompleteness of the Symposium
  • Self-knowledge, love, and rhetoric (Plato's Phaedrus)
  • The setting
  • Non-lovers (Lysias' speech and Socrates' first speech)
  • Souls and their fall
  • Lovers and their ascent
  • Prayer to love
  • Contemporary rhetoric and politics
  • A genuine art of rhetoric
  • Writing
  • Prayer to Pan
  • Who is the friend? (the Lysis)
  • Joining the group
  • Getting acquainted
  • Seeking a friend
  • Are friends the ones loving, the ones loved, or both?
  • Are likes friends?
  • Are unlikes friends?
  • Are those who are neither good nor bad friends to the good?
  • Are the kindred friends?
  • Who might friends be?
  • Friendly communities
  • Socratic philosophizing
  • Socrates' youthful search for cause
  • Socrates' second sailing and the ideas
  • Piety, poetry, and friendship

Description and Table of Contents

Description

In Socrates on Friendship and Community, Mary P. Nichols addresses Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's criticism of Socrates and recovers the place of friendship and community in Socratic philosophizing. This approach stands in contrast to the modern philosophical tradition, in which Plato's Socrates has been viewed as an alienating influence on Western thought and life. Nichols' rich analysis of both dramatic details and philosophic themes in Plato's Symposium, Phaedras, and Lysis shows how love finds its fulfilment in the reciprocal relation of friends. Nichols also shows how friends experience another as their own and themselves as belonging to another. Their experience, she argues, both sheds light on the nature of philosophy and serves as a standard for a political life that does justice to human freedom and community.

Table of Contents

  • 1. The problem of Socrates: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
  • 2. Love, generation, and political community (the Symposium)
  • 3. Self-knowledge, love, and rhetoric (Plato's Phaedrus)
  • 4. Who is the friend? (the Lysis)
  • 5. Socratic philosophizing.

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