Abstract

When I was asked to contribute an issue to the Literature and Aesthetics series on great thinkers in aesthetics, I did not appreciate how difficult it might be to put together a volume on Plato. Originally my plan was simply to call the volume Plato’s Aesthetics, or Plato on Art and Beauty. I came to realise, however, that Plato was not driven to write about art from an interest in aesthetics (at least not aesthetics as we know it), and that the terms ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ are very inaccurate descriptors for what Plato was “on about”, as they say here in Australia. The fact is that Plato is concerned with all sorts of matters that walk under the umbrella of literature and aesthetics—poetry, drama, myth, music, painting, perspective, attractiveness, organicity, creativity, criticism, truth, and philosophy—and the terms ‘aesthetics’, ‘art’, and ‘beauty’ convey only a small portion of them. What was needed was a more comprehensive conception of Plato’s interest.