The Philosophic Dialogue

Catalog description

In this course, we will read philosophical dialogues and their modern successors—a novel and a play—about art and rhetoric. Ancient to modern writers have been fascinated with the power of art, and for each, ideas about art are connected to those about language and society. Our reading of Ion and Gorgias will look at Plato's ideas on art, rhetoric (oratory), and power before his Republic. Phaedrus, written later, develops Plato's ideas about the relation of the intellect, the emotions, and the appetites. Diderot's Rameau's Nephew revisits some of Plato's themes from the perspective of the eighteenth century and the changing world of the Enlightenment. Finally, we will explore dialogue form in the twentieth century through Virginia Woolf's novel Between the Acts and Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia. Among the questions we will consider together are the following: How are ideas born from conversation (and from our conversations)? What is the importance of human relationship in intellectual inquiry? Readings may include works by Plato, Diderot, Stoppard, and Woolf.