Professor Jim Forrester

About the Speaker: (University of Wyoming)

"Why Are the Late Platonic Dialogues So Strange?"
Abstract: Readers of Plato who come unprepared to such late dialogues as the Sophist, the Parmenides, and the Theaetetus are often startled by what they find.  If Socrates is in the conversation of one of these dialogues at all, he sounds quite unlike the familiar, professorial Socrates of the Republic.  Both in form and in content, late Platonic dialogues are remarkably unlike the middle dialogues.  The question is why?  The answer I propose is that Plato has in his late works fully absorbed and adopted a new and less slapdash way of doing philosophy.  The man from whom he learned this new way is no other than Parmenides.  The result is a more philosophically sophisticated Plato, whom 21^st-Century students can and should take seriously as a genuine philosopher.

Friday, November 12, 2004 at 5:10 p.m. in Hoyt Hall, Room 215