Thinking of death in Plato's Euthydemus : a close reading and new translation / Gwenda-lin Grewal.

9780191944673 (ebook) :

First edition.

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2022.

1 online resource (xii, 283 pages).

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This title places Plato's Euthydemus among the dialogues that surround the trial and death of Socrates. A premonition of philosophy's fate arrives in the form of Socrates' encounter with the two-headed sophist pair, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, who appear as if they are the ghost of the Socrates of Aristophanes' Thinkery. The pair vacillate between choral ode and rhapsody, as Plato vacillates between referring to them in the dual and plural number in Greek. Gwenda-lin Grewal's close reading explores how the structure of the dialogue and the pair's back-and-forth arguments bear a striking resemblance to thinking itself: in its immersive remove from reality, thinking simulates death even as it cannot conceive of its possibility. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus take this to an extreme, and so emerge as the philosophical dream and sophistic nightmare of being disembodied from substance.

Oxford scholarship online.

Print version :

Books / Online

English

April 21, 2022

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Specialized.