Plato's Animals

Description

Read Chapter 8 from Plato's Animals: "Who Let the Dogs Out?" by Christopher P. Long

Who Let the Dogs Out? by Indiana University Press

Plato's Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato's Dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato's work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato's understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato's bestiary in both Greek and English.

Editors' Introduction: Plato's Menagerie

Part I. The Animal of Fable and Myth
1. Making Music with Aesop's Fables in the Phaedo / Heidi Northwood
2. "Talk to the Animals": On the Myth of Cronos in the Statesman / David Farrell Krell

Part II. Socrates as muōps and narkē
3. American Gadfly: Plato and the Problem of Metaphor / Michael Naas
4. Till Human Voices Wake Us and We Drown: The Aporia-fish in the Meno / Thomas Thorp

Part III. The Socratic Animal as Truth-Teller and Provocateur
5. We the Bird-Catchers: Receiving the Truth in the Phaedo and the Apology / S. Montgomery Ewegen
6. The Dog on the Fly / H. Peter Steeves

Part IV. The Political Animal
7. Taming Horses and Desires: Plato's Politics of Care / Jeremy Bell
8. Who Let the Dogs Out? Tracking the Philosophical Life among the Wolves and Dogs of the Republic / Christopher Long

Part V. The (En)gendered Animal
9. The City of Sows and Sexual Differentiation in the Republic / Marina McCoy
10. Animality and Sexual Difference in the Timaeus / Sara Brill

Part VI. The Philosophical Animal
11. Animal Sacrifice in Plato's Later Methodology / Holly Moore
12. The Animals That Therefore We Were? Aristophanes's Double-Creatures and the Question of Origins / Drew A. Hyland

Part VII. Animals and the Afterlife
13. Animals and Angels: The Myth of Life as a Whole in Republic 10 / Claudia Baracchi
14. Of Beasts and Heroes: The Promiscuity of Humans and Animals in the Myth of Er / Francisco J. Gonzalez

List of Contributors
Plato's Animals Index
Name and Subject Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Movements
• Essays
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Phenomenology

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253016201
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

PLATO S ANIMALS
STUDIES IN CONTINENTAL THOUGHT
John Sallis, editor
Consulting Editors
Robert Bernasconi
William L. McBride
Rudolph Bernet
J. N. Mohanty
John D. Caputo
Mary Rawlinson
David Carr
Tom Rockmore
Edward S. Casey
Calvin O. Schrag
Hubert Dreyfus
Reiner Sch rmann
Don Ihde
Charles E. Scott
David Farrell Krell
Thomas Sheehan
Lenore Langsdorf
Robert Sokolowski
Alphonso Lingis
Bruce W. Wilshire
David Wood

This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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2015 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Plato s animals : gadflies, horses, swans, and other philosophical beasts / Edited by Jeremy Bell and Michael Naas.
pages cm. - (Studies in continental thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01613-3 (hardback : alk. paper) -
ISBN 978-0-253-01617-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-01620-1 (ebook) 1. Plato. Dialogues. 2. Animals (Philosophy)
I. Bell, Jeremy, [date] editor. II. Naas, Michael, editor.
B398.A64P53 2015
184-dc23
2014039533
1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18 17 16 15
Contents
Editors Introduction: Plato s Menagerie
Part I. The Animal of Fable and Myth
1 Making Music with Aesop s Fables in the Phaedo / Heidi Northwood
2 Talk to the Animals : On the Myth of Cronos in the Statesman / David Farrell Krell
Part II. Socrates as mu ps and nark
3 American Gadfly: Plato and the Problem of Metaphor / Michael Naas
4 Till Human Voices Wake Us and We Drown: The Aporia-fish in the Meno / Thomas Thorp
Part III. The Socratic Animal as Truth-Teller and Provocateur
5 We the Bird-Catchers: Receiving the Truth in the Phaedo and the Apology / S. Montgomery Ewegen
6 The Dog on the Fly / H. Peter Steeves
Part IV. The Political Animal
7 Taming Horses and Desires: Plato s Politics of Care / Jeremy Bell
8 Who Let the Dogs Out? Tracking the Philosophical Life among the Wolves and Dogs of the Republic / Christopher P. Long
Part V. The (En)gendered Animal
9 The City of Sows and Sexual Differentiation in the Republic / Marina McCoy
10 Animality and Sexual Difference in the Timaeus / Sara Brill
Part VI. The Philosophical Animal
11 Animal Sacrifice in Plato s Later Methodology / Holly Moore
12 The Animals That Therefore We Were? Aristophanes s Double-Creatures and the Question of Origins / Drew A. Hyland
Part VII. Animals and the Afterlife
13 Animals and Angels: The Myth of Life as a Whole in Republic 10 / Claudia Baracchi
14 Of Beasts and Heroes: The Promiscuity of Humans and Animals in the Myth of Er / Francisco J. Gonzalez
List of Contributors
Plato s Animals Index
Name and Subject Index
PLATO S ANIMALS
Editors Introduction
Plato s Menagerie
A S EVERY STUDENT of philosophy well knows, Socrates was truly a beast, a philosophical animal par excellence. In the Apology , he compares himself to a gadfly who has spent his entire life stinging the lethargic horse that is the city of Athens in order to keep it from falling into slumbering ignorance. In the Meno , Socrates is portrayed as a stingray or, more accurately, a torpedo ray who shocks or benumbs his interlocutors and causes them to question all their previously held beliefs, while in the Symposium he is compared to a venomous snake whose philosophical discourses strike at the heart or soul of those who hear them. In other dialogues, Socrates compares himself not to some stinging or biting beast, some predatory animal, but precisely the opposite, to a fawn at the mercy of a lion in the Charmides or, in Alcibiades I , to an old stork who hopes to be cared for by his young, that is, by his students. And then there is the Phaedo , the dialogue that takes place on the day of his execution, where Socrates compares himself to a prophetic swan singing his most beautiful song-arguments about the immortality of the soul-in anticipation of his imminent death.
Gadfly and horse, swan, snake, stork, fawn, and torpedo ray: this is already a pretty impressive and diverse assembly of animals. But it is really just the beginning of the enormous bestiary contained in Plato s dialogues. Indeed, animal images, examples, analogies, myths, or fables are used in almost every one of Plato s dialogues to help characterize, delimit, and define many of the dialogues most important figures and themes. They are used to portray not just Socrates but many other characters in the dialogues, from the wolfish Thrasymachus of the Republic to the venerable racehorse Parmenides of the Parmenides . Even more, animals are used throughout the dialogues to develop some of Plato s most important political or philosophical ideas. In the Republic , for example, the guardians of the ideal polis are compared to trained guard dogs who must protect the state from marauding wolves, that is, from tyrants and sophists of various kinds. In the same dialogue, the human soul is itself compared to a composite animal with a human head, a lion s torso, and nether parts like a multiheaded beast, while in the Phaedrus it is likened to a charioteer and two horses, with the former ruling over and guiding the latter.
It is thus often through images or examples of animals, along with the analogical relationships that come along with these, that Plato is able to develop a hierarchy not just between humans and animals but between rulers and the ruled, men and women, adults and children, free men and slaves, and so on. It is not too much to say that animal references are employed to help characterize, explain, or value almost every aspect of human life. In the Republic and the Phaedo , we even hear Socrates argue that the character and destiny of animals pursue humans beyond life right into the afterlife, since it is suggested there that a human soul that does not devote itself to a life of philosophy is likely upon its death to pass into the body of a donkey, hawk, kite, or wolf, or, if it is lucky, a bee, wasp, or ant.
Plato s dialogues are thus teeming with animals of every kind, not only gadflies, horses, swans, snakes, and torpedo rays, but wolves, dogs, pigs, donkeys, hawks, bees, roosters, bulls, foxes, monkeys, locusts, oysters-and the list goes on. By our reckoning, there is but a single dialogue (the Crito ) that does not contain any obvious reference to animals, while most dialogues have many. What is more, throughout Plato s dialogues the activity or enterprise of philosophy itself is often compared to a hunt, where the interlocutors are the hunters and the object of the dialogue s search-ideas of justice, beauty, courage, piety, or friendship-their elusive animal prey. Hence animal images, examples, metaphors, and tropes are used throughout the dialogues to develop not just Plato s dialogical characters, and not just the differences between the human and the animal, but many of the most important aspects of his ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and political theory. To understand Plato s dialogues, then, it seems necessary to explain the presence of all these animals in the dialogues, their strategic or rhetorical necessity as well as their philosophical significance.
Plato s Animals is an attempt to give an account of the scope and importance of this remarkable bestiary in Plato s philosophy. It is a first attempt not just to gather or collect the many animal references into a single volume but to explain their function or purpose in the dialogues. While there have been numerous books in recent years that have treated the question of the animal in contemporary thought, or else the presence and significance of animals in a particular thinker, for example in Nietzsche, there has been nothing of the sort on Plato-whose bestiary is, we believe, just as rich and important for understanding his work as Nietzsche s bestiary is for his. 1
This collection demonstrates that Plato s many appeals to animal images, analogies, and examples are not, as most commentators have treated them, mere rhetorical embellishments of otherwise independent philosophical ideas and arguments but essential elements of Plato s philosophy. The essays gathered here demonstrate that without such animal references Plato would have been unable to develop a full and coherent account of human society, human sexuality, human virtue, or the human soul. Even Plato s account of the nature of the cosmos itself would have been incomplete without such references to animal life. In other words, without this appeal to an animal world that is, for Plato, essentially without philosophy, Plato would have never been able to delineate a sphere for philosophy itself. Plato s Animals thus demonstrates that, without his animals, Plato would have never been able to develop a philosophy as coherent, comprehensive, and authoritative as the one he has.
Plato s Animals brings together contributions from scholars in the field of ancient philosophy on the theme of animals in Plato with a view to illuminating these larger aspects of Plato s philosophy. The volume is thus much more than a sophisticated lexicon for Plato s many animal references. Each essay in the volume looks at Plato s use of animals in the dialogue