Evenus of Parus plays a surprisingly important role in Plato’s account of the life and death of Socrates: in both the Apology and the Phaedo he works as a negative foil for the philosopher at two key moments, namely when he converts, respectively, to the practice of elenchus and to the composition of poetry. Evenus’ importance in Socrates’ life, I argue, reflects Plato’s appropriation of a number of his poems, which Plato reshapes so as to adapt the sophist’s relativism and (...) values, arguably modelled on Protagoras’, to his own truth-oriented agenda. Plato’s Phaedrus echoes Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen along similar lines, that is by replacing doxa with aletheia. A pattern emerges: Plato appropriates the writings of the sophists by placing them in a markedly truth-oriented context. This helps explain a discussed piece of information, according to which Protagoras’ Antilogiai was a major influence on Plato’s Republic. (shrink)

This paper makes the following claims: 1) early playwrights (especially Cratinus and Epicharmus, with a new reading of frr. 23B1-2 DK = 275-276 PCG) were keen on lampooning Eleatism; 2) through literary and linguistic devices that were obvious for Plato's original public, Plato revived this tradition in the Parmenides; 3) the Parmenides portrays the Eleats as catastrophically counterproductive philosophers. In sharp contrast with Socratic logoi, Eleatism, far from promoting philosophy (protreptic), eventually alienates all possible disciples ('apotreptic'), thus undermining the very (...) notion of Platonic philo-sophia. (shrink)

This paper revisits Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on mimesis with a special emphasis on mythos as an integral part of it. I argue that the Republic ’s notorious “mirror argument” is in fact ad hominem : first, Plato likely has in mind Agathon’s mirror in Aristophanes’ Thesmoforiazusae, where tragedy is construed as mimesis ; second, the tongue-in-cheek claim that mirrors can reproduce invisible Hades, when read in combination with the following eschatological myth, suggests that Plato was not committed to a (...) mirror-like view of art; third, the very omission of mythos shows that the argument is a self-consciously one-sided one, designed to caricature the artists’ own pretensions of mirror-like realism. These points reinforce Stephen Halliwell’s claim that Western aesthetics has been haunted by a «ghostly misapprehension» of Plato’s mirror. Further evidence comes from Aristotle’s “literary” discussion: rather than to the “mirror argument”, the beginning of the Poetics points to the Phaedo as the best source of information about Plato’s views on poetry. (shrink)

This essay discusses Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnical framework as it relates to recent contributions that deal with the inherent opacities of digital technology and processes of blackboxing. I argue that Sloterdijk’s philosophy is a precious case of affirmative, non-nihilistic technophilic thinking that espouses the technogenic provenance of mankind, and leaves space for technologically engendered incomprehensibility while tracing a horizon for human beings’ resoluteness. In the first section of my essay I tackle Sloterdijk’s reflections on the philosophical transition from wonder to horror in (...) the twentieth century, and I put it in dialogue with his concept of the monstrous as defined by boundlessness, complexity, and excess. Here, I discuss how the human being shows both monster-slayer and monstrous tendencies. Secondly, after having revisited the question “what happened in the twentieth century” from this perspective, I discuss how Sloterdijk’s analysis of the monstrous provides a coherent genealogy for an assessment of the individual’s relation to current “monstrous” technologies, as they are tied to algorithmic processing. I conclude by arguing that Sloterdijk’s anthropotechnics and onto-anthropology allow for an acrobatic confrontation with the possibility of untethering technological advancement from illusory promises of absolute clarity, and promote the immunological value of darkness. (shrink)