Product details
- ISBN 9780791475836
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 18 Dec 2008
- Publisher: State University of New York Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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A lively and highly readable commentary on one of Plato's most beloved dialogues.
Erotic Wisdom provides a careful reading of one of Plato's most beloved dialogues, the Symposium, which explores the nature and scope of human desire (erôs). Gary Alan Scott and William A. Welton engage all of the dialogue's major themes, devoting special attention to illuminating Plato's conception of philosophy. In the Symposium, Plato situates philosophy in an intermediate (metaxu) position-between need and resource, ignorance and knowledge-showing how the very lack of what one desires can become a guiding form of contact with the objects of human desire. The authors examine the concept of intermediacy in relation both to Platonic metaphysics and to Plato's moral psychology, arguing that philosophy, for Plato, is properly understood as a kind of "being in-between," as the love of wisdom (philosophia) rather than the possession of it.
At Loyola College in Maryland, Gary Alan Scott is Associate Professor of Philosophy, and William A. Welton is Visiting Affiliate Professor of Philosophy. Scott is the author of Plato's Socrates as Educator, also published by SUNY Press, and Welton is the editor of Plato's Forms: Varieties of Interpretation.
