The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry in Protagoras: An Aporia
Keywords:
Socrates, Plato, irony, poetry, sophisticAbstract
In the Protagoras, there is an intriguing passage. After having asked Protagoras to avoid long speeches (334d) because he has allegedly a short memory, Socrates responds to the sophist in a long speech on a poem by Simonides, two sequences of which were quoted by Protagoras. Socrates reveals himself not only as having an excellent memory, since he quotes several further sequences from the poem, but also as an expert in the interpretation of poetry. In this long speech, too, he refers to sophistic in Lacedaemon as paramount to philosophy (342b). This passage, I propose, gives some clues to the relations between sophistic and philosophy, on one hand, and poetry and philosophy, on the other. Here we can see not only Socrates but also Plato assuming an ironic posture.
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References
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