Dmitri Nikulin (Editor) - The Other Plato: The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato’s Inner-Academic Teachings

THE OTHER PLATO

The Tbingen Interpretation of Plato's Inner-Academic Teachings

EDITED BY

DMITRI NIKULIN

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

2012 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The other Plato : the Tbingen interpretation of Plato's inner-academic teachings / Dmitri Nikulin.

p. cm. (SUNY series in contemporary Continental philosophy)

(SUNY series in ancient Greek philosophy)

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 978-1-4384-4409-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Plato. I. Nikulin, D. V. (Dmitrii Vladimirovich)

B395.O75 2012

184dc23

2011050354

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The essays included in this collection have been previously published as:

H. J. Krmer. : Zu Platon, Politeia 509B. Archiv fr Geschichte der Philosophie 51 (1969): 130.

H. J. Krmer. Platons ungeschriebene Lehre. In Platon: Seine Dialoge in der Sicht der neueren Forschung, ed. T. Kobusch and B. Mojsisch, 249275. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996.

K. Gaiser. Platons Zusammenschau der mathematischen Wissenschaften. Antike und Abendland 32 (1986): 89124.

Th. A. Szlezk. Die Idee des Guten als arche in Platons Politeia. In New Images of Plato: Dialogues on the Idea of the Good, ed. G. Reale and S. Scolnicov, 4968. Sankt Augustin: Academia, 2000.

J. Halfwassen. Monism and Dualism in Plato's Doctrine of Principles. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 23 (2002): 125144.

V. Hsle. Platons Grundlegung der Euklidizitt der Geometrie. Philologus 126 (1982): 184197; rpt. Platon interpretieren, 145165. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schningh, 2004.

I would like to thank the publishers, Academia Verlag, De Gruyter, Ferdinand Schningh Verlag, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, and the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal for permission to include translations of the essays in this volume.

I am also grateful to Mitchell Miller and Burt Hopkins for their very helpful comments on the manuscript, to Mario Wenning for exemplary translation of five articles included in this collection, and to Duane Lacey, Erick Raphael Jimnez, and Joseph Lemelin for their help and dedication with the editing of the manuscript. Without their persistence, as well as without the generous support of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung in the form of research grants at the universities of Tbingen and Heidelberg, this book could not have been published.

ONE

PLATO: TESTIMONIA ET FRAGMENTA

Dmitri Nikulin

Plato is a unique character among the dramatis personae in the history of philosophy. No other thinker arouses so much emotion and dissent among readers and interpreters. Passions are inevitably stirred when one tries to answer a simple question: What does Plato want to say, and what does he actually say? Plato wrote dialogues, which are fine pieces of literature and reasoning but which may always be read and interpreted differently, especially since the speakers often do not commit themselves to any particular philosophical position and the question discussed frequently remains unanswered and sometimes not even explicitly asked. Moreover, it is neither easy to discern Plato's own position at any given moment in the discussion, nor who is speaking behind his characters. When Socrates is engaged in a dialectical debate of a subject (such as wisdom, courage, love, friendship, temperance, etc.) does he really mean what he says, if one takes into account his undeniably ironic stance? And is it Plato who speaks through Socrates, Socrates himself, or an anonymous voice ascribed to Socrates, made to say what he has to within the logic of the conversation? Plato appears to always escape and defy any final and finalized conclusion, being an Apollo's bird, the swan that, as Socrates predicted, still remains not captured by generations of later readers and interpreters.

Because of the seeming uncertainty of what has actually been said, reading Plato is a fascinating yet risky enterprise, for we might need to reconsider not only our understanding of a text but also the very principles of philosophical reading and interpretation. It is perhaps not by chance that modern hermeneutics arises with Schleiermacher and flourishes in Gadamer as primarily an attempt to make sense of the Platonic dialogues, of their intention and proper sense. Yet, since the dialogues appear to be open to a variety of consistent but mutually conflicting interpretations, reading them leads to so much disagreement, misunderstanding, and even mutual mistrust in the guild of fellow Plato scholars.