Plato’s Arguments And The Dialogue Form

Abstract

Abstract Plato’s dialogues are works of art. They are pieces of powerful dramatic fiction which by their art manage to give us a strong sense of what it would be like to listen to a dialectical debate or even to participate in it; they perhaps give us a stronger sense of what is involved in such a debate than we could have acquired by actually attending an ordinary dialectical discussion. For they represent paradigmatic debates between model characters in characteristic settings in a most vivid and realistic way. To this end they display an impressive mastery of a wide array of literary techniques. The dialogues put themselves into the literary tradition, by their constant allusions to earlier literature, by their constant reworking of motifs and themes of traditional literature from Homer and Hesiod down to the tragedies. Even a dialogue dealing with such abstract and prosaic material as is handled in the Sophist is eminently literary in this way.

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