Download Plato's Animals: Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and Other by Jeremy Bell, Michael Naas PDF

By Jeremy Bell, Michael Naas

Plato's Animals examines the the most important function performed by way of animal photos, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato's Dialogues. those fourteen full of life essays display that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, canine, horses, and different animals that populate Plato's paintings are usually not simply rhetorical gildings. Animals are primary to Plato's figuring out of the hierarchy among animals, people, and gods and are an important to his principles approximately schooling, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the character of the soul, and philosophy itself. the quantity incorporates a entire annotated index to Plato’s bestiary in either Greek and English.

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Extra resources for Plato's Animals: Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and Other Philosophical Beasts

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And that I am, as I say, a kind of gift from the god, you might understand from this; for I have neglected all my own affairs and have been enduring the neglect of my concerns all these years, but I am always busy in your interest, coming to each one of you individually like a father or an elder brother and urging you to care for virtue. (Apology 30e–31b) So there you have it, more or less as every Introduction to Philosophy student will have encountered it. The city of Athens is like a large horse prone to sluggishness, and Socrates is like a gadfly or horsefly that urges it on; he is the gadfly that keeps the inhabitants of the city from falling into a lifelong sleep by turning them through questioning away from the pursuit of material gain and toward the acquisition of virtue.

Plato’s Timaeus, which was taken for a millennium or two to be Plato’s scientific treatise on cosmology, is whimsical to the point of hilarity or even hysteria. Plato’s whimsy, the Pythagorean caprice of Timaeus, is all about life—universal life, the life of gods and men, plant life, and, at the very end, even female life and animal life, with women, birds, terrestrial animals, and oysters marching onto the scene more or less in descending order. What complicates the Timaean story is that, at least to our way of thinking, mortals of many different kinds appear to be borne by and born of women.

And this was the reason why at that time the gods created in us the desire of sexual intercourse, contriving in man one living creature [ζῷον], and in woman another.  . Wherefore also in men the organ of generation, becoming rebellious and masterful like something alive [οἷον ζῷον], yet not heeding speech, and maddened with the sting of lust, seeks to gain absolute sway, and the same is the case with the so-called womb or matrix of women.  . γένεσιν]. In this way, women and all that is female were made.

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