Plato's Symposium1 CDC Reeve It Is Notoriously Difficult to Discover The
Colloquium 3 Telling the Truth About Love: Plato's Symposium1 C.D.C. Reeve It is notoriously difficult to discover the truth about erotic love, difficult even to discover who we ought to learn it from (Freud, Darwin, the family doctor, a more experienced friend, a more experienced lover, a less experienced lover ...?). It is this latter difficulty that the Symposium addresses? It is about eros, about erotic love, certainly, but it is as much about authority in things erotic as it is about ta er6tika themselves. My discussion, which outlines an approach to the Symposium as a whole, will proceed in four stages mingling topics as seems appropriate. In Part I, I discuss Agathon, Pausanius, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Phaedrus; in Part II, Socrates and his examination of Agathon; in Part III, Diotima's Speech; and in Part IV the speech of Alcibiades. I The collection of people at Agathon's dinner party is presented as being more or less accidental - these just are the people who happened to be there. But, as is always true of Plato's dialogues, 1. This is a revised version of a paper presented in the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy at Brown University and read subsequently at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Questions from Martha Nussbaum, comments from Mary Whitlock Blundell, and a very useful letter from Michael Pakaluk led me to make some important changes in Section III. Mark Bedau and Jennifer Dellner helped me inprove an earlier version. 2. Translations of the Symposium are based on Nehamas A., and Woodruff P., 1989.
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