Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy [Paperback]

Andrea Wilson Nightingale (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0521774330 | ISBN-13: 978-0521774338 | Publication Date: May 8, 2000

In this very original study, the author investigates how Plato "invented" the discipline of philosophy. In order to define and legitimize philosophy, Dr. Nightingale maintains, Plato had to match it against genres of discourse that had authority and currency in democratic Athens. By incorporating traditional genres of poetry and rhetoric into his dialogues, Plato marks the boundaries of philosophy as a discursive and as a social practice.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This fascinating study sheds new light on the old puzzle: despite his notorious attack on poetry, Plato was a literary genius. Nightingale does not simply explore literary aspects of Plato's writings, however; she articulates deep structural and thematic relations between the dialogues and the alien literary genres of tragedy, lyric, and comedy." Choice

"This fascinating study sheds new light on the old puzzle: despite his notorious attack on poetry, Plato was a literary genius. Nightingale does not simply explore literary aspects of Plato's writings, however; she articulates deep structural and thematic relations between the dialogues and the alien literary genres of tragedy, lyric, and comedy....Strongly recommended for college and university libraries." Choice

"Andrea Nightingale's fine book on Plato and the 'construct' of philosophy is everywhere responsive to the contingency of philosophical discourse....this work thus provides essential philological insights into the distinctions between philosophy and its rival forms of discourse (including poetry and rhetoric) at a moment when those boundaries first came to be demarcated in an explicit and systematic way." Philosophy of Literature

"The merits of Nightingale's book are considerable. It deals with many questions of language and discourse that are dear to postmodernists, but it treats them with clarity which an analytic philosopher will appreciate." Joseph A. Novak, Review of Metaphysics

Book Description

In this very original study, the author investigates how Plato 'invented' the discipline of philosophy. In order to define and legitimise philosophy, Dr Nightingale maintains, Plato had to match it against genres of discourse that had authority and currency in democratic Athens. By incorporating traditional genres of poetry and rhetoric into his dialogues, Plato marks the boundaries of philosophy as a discursive and as a social practice.

Product Details

• Paperback: 238 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (May 8, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521774330
• ISBN-13: 978-0521774338
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #553,084 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Andrea Nightingale is a Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. A Guggenheim recipient and a Harvard Senior Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, she has written on literary, philosophical, and ecological issues. With the help of an architectural firm, Nightingale has co-designed a house in the Santa Cruz Mountains. An organic gardener, mountaineer, and lover of the natural world, she calls on herself and her students to have green thoughts (and to act on them).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books on "the literary Plato", May 4, 2008

By 

Alexander Alderman "neophyte classical philol... (Providence, Rhode Island) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy (Paperback)

People generally recognize that Socratic dialogues are "dialogical" in some fuller sense than just alternating speakers, but describing this quality is quite difficult. Baktin is the best critic for this subject, but reading him can be quite trying, and later Bakhtinian criticism often leads to rather vague or tangential musings on the nature of discourse. Not so with this monograph, a rather nuts and bolts guide to the dialogical elements in Plato's writings and their origins in the rich dramatic and rhetorical genres of fifth and fourth century Greece.

What's more ambitious than showing how this dialogism works in each genre is Nightingale's attempt to show how Plato draws the dialogical elements out of those genres to put his own work into a dialogical relationship _with_ those genres. She's most successful with the genres of tragedy and encomium in her second and third chapters, and her fourth chapter, on the slippery relationship between genre elements and the works that include them, is probably the best in the book. I feel that much more could have been done with the fifth chapter, which seems hampered by our discipline-wide anxiety over the earnestness of Books V and VI of Plato's Republic. Even so, it's the best book I've read on Plato in years, and a good place to start for people wanting to read historically informed, theoretically contemporary literary criticism on Plato.