In theLysisSocrates deals with the problem of what is a friend and what is friendship. After giving an introduction and a synopsis of theLysisin section one, I explain, in section two, Socrates’ view that a true friend is “what is akin” or “what is belonging to oneself” which is what is taken from oneself and discovered in another person. When this happens among two persons, they become friends to each other. The content of what is akin is either a good (...) characteristic or ways or form of the soul. Friendship is the desire for what is akin. In section three I show that Socrates remains inaporiawhile he faces several problems. Unless he is able to answer such problems, he will not be truly confident about what is a friend. In section four I deal with and refute Penner’s and Rowe’s view that a true friend means wisdom. In section five I examine the view of friendship which occurs among people who share common deficit. As a conclusion, in section six, I reflect on the significance of my interpretation and the role of theLysisin Plato’s philosophy. (shrink)

This article examines how Plato uses mythological symbolisms in the Lysis, specifically those of Hermes, to show how our experience of the good makes possible our capacity to love our friend as an individual, and in so doing overturns the static dualities usually associated with Plato’s ‘metaphysics’. Instead of appealing to allegedly impersonal ideas, Plato refigures Greek mythological understandings of Hermes to signal, first, that friendship is a movement of divine love in which human beings participate and to which they (...) are reoriented so that they may behold their friend as an individual, as a person, and second, that this reorientation is needed to place the dialectical inquiry into friendship upon proper starting points. Instead of eclipsing the individual in the shadow of impersonal ideas, Plato appeals to Hermes, the most human, most creative and thus most political, of Olympians, whose name means windfall [hermaion], to show how we must open ourselves up to the divine in order fully to love our friend as an individual person. (shrink)

This article updates “The State of the Question in the Study of Plato” (Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1996) based on research covering the years from 1995–2015. Its three major parts examine: (1) how the mid‐twentieth‐century consensus has fared, (2) whether the new trends identified in that article have continued, and (3) identify trends either new or missed in the original article. On the whole, it shows the continuing decline of dogmatic and nondramatic Plato interpretation and the expansion and ramification of (...) the more literary, dramatic, and nondogmatic “new Platonism.” What was a growing insurgency twenty years ago can now be described as a, if not the, dominant approach. (shrink)

Plato’s characterization of philia in Lysis, on one hand, as one-sided belonging to the ultimate object of our desire and, on the other, as interpersonal reciprocal belonging appears problematic. Yonesawa has recently claimed that one can make sense of both uses of “belonging” if we assume that one is the other’s friend when each one coincides in being the ultimate object of the other’s desire. This paper proposes instead that Lysis’ ‘reciprocity’ of friendship results from friends’ right wanting, which presupposes (...) their souls are well-disposed to a true object of desire. To prove this, I will argue that (i) the action and the argument of the dialogue exhibit this kind of reciprocity, (ii) there is a ‘unique’ ultimate object of desire (‘teleological monism’), that consists of a ‘knowledge about the good life’ and (iii) only the common longing for such knowledge can make possible friends’ reciprocal belonging. (shrink)