The Musical Structure of Plato's Dialogues.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (337 pages)
Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- 1. The nature and history of philosophical allegory -- 1.1 Rehabilitating ancient ways of reading -- 1.2 Allegory, Socrates and Plato -- 1.3 Symbols, reserve and Pythagoreanism -- 1.4 Persecution and the politics of allegory in classical Athens -- 1.5 Plato and Pythagoreanism: two puzzles -- 1.6 The allegorical Plato in history -- 1.7 Methodological precedent: early Christianity -- 1.8 Methodological precedent: Renaissance Platonism -- 2. Introducing the dialogues' musical structure -- 2.1 Structuring a dialogue -- 2.2 Ancient Greek music: three key ideas -- 2.3 Plato's symbolic scheme -- 2.4 Harmony and consonance, disharmony and dissonance -- 2.5 Sevenths and mixture -- 2.6 Guide to the strongest evidence -- 2.7 Methodology for line-counting -- 2.8 Canons of criticism -- 2.9 Responses to possible objections -- 3. Independent lines of evidence -- 3.1 Simple, objective measurements -- 3.2 Parallel passages at the same relative location -- 3.3 Ranges of positive and negative concepts -- 3.4 Preview of the musical structure in the Republic -- 3.5 A control: falsifiability and the pseudo-Platonica -- 4. An emphatic pattern in the Symposium's frame -- 4.1 A theory of music -- 4.2 Recurring clusters of features in the frame -- 4.3 A new kind of commentary -- 5. Making the Symposium's musical structure explicit -- 5.1 Phaedrus -- 5.2 Pausanias -- 5.3 Eryximachus -- 5.4 Aristophanes -- 5.5 Agathon -- 5.6 Socrates and Diotima -- 5.7 Alcibiades -- 6. Parallel structure in the Euthyphro -- 6.1 The same scale and the same symbolic scheme -- 6.2 Guide to the strongest evidence -- 6.3 The sevenths -- 6.4 The connection to music -- 6.5 Another kind of evidence: parallels between dialogues -- 6.6 The Euthyphro is not aporetic. 6.7 Marking the notes -- 7. Extracting doctrine from structure -- 7.1 Aristotle on virtues and means -- 7.2 Stichometry and the divided line -- 7.3 Reading the dialogues in parallel -- 7.4 The logic of the argument and its consequences -- 8. Some implications -- 8.1 Summary of the case -- 8.2 Interpreting the dialogues -- 8.3 Problems with anonymity and intentionality -- 8.4 Interpreting Plato, Pythagoras and Socrates -- 8.5 History of music and mathematics -- 8.6 History of literature and literary theory -- 8.7 Ancient book production, papyrology, textual studies -- 8.8 The forward path -- Appendix 1: More musicological background -- Appendix 2: Neo-Pythagoreans, the twelve-note scale and the monochord -- Appendix 3: Markers between the major notes -- Appendix 4: The central notes -- Appendix 5: Systematic theory of the marking passages -- Appendix 6: Structure in Agathon and Socrates' speeches -- Appendix 7: Euripides and line-counting -- Appendix 8: Data from the Republic -- Appendix 9: OCT line numbers for the musical notes -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Argues that Plato's dialogues have an unsuspected musical structure and use symbols to encode Pythagorean doctrines. This title shows that Plato gave his dialogues a similar, hidden musical structure. It begins with an introduction to Plato's symbolic schemes and the role of allegory in ancient times.