Platos Dialogues As Educational Models Essay -- Philosophy Research P

Dialogue, Dialectic, and Maieutic: Plato's Dialogues As Educational Models ABSTRACT: Plato’s Socrates exemplies the progress of the dialectical method of inquiry. Such a method is capable of actualizing an interlocutor’s latent potential for philosophizing dialectically. The dianoetic practice of Plato’s Socrates is a mixture of dialectical assertions and questions arising out of his ethical concern for the interlocutor. The Dialogues act as educational models exhibiting how one inquires and learns as well as how one must teach in order that others learn to be participants in (or practitioners of) the dialectic. This is the maieutic art of Plato’s Socrates with which he draws his interlocutors into stating and reflecting upon the implications of their uncritically held opinions. We could say that the real subject-matter of many of the Dialogues is at least as much education in the dialectical process while still respecting the literary form of the Dialogues as exhibitive construction. The lack of philosophical closure that often characterizes many of the Dialogues lends additional credence to this position. The subject-matter of many of the dialogues is, therefore, reflexive: it is about itself in the sense that the tacit lesson (practicing the dialectic) will be remembered after its ostensible subject (some philosophical problem) has ceased to be debated. Dialectic is, then, renewable and replicable as an educational method, using "psychagogy"—an instrument of maieutic—to determine first each student’s individual needs for guiding him toward understanding. The Dialogues As Educational Models Plato's Dialogues are intellectual, noetic experiences; as dramatizations of communicative interactions, they bring into exhibition... ...ress, 1980. Grassi, Ernesto. Rhetoric As Philosophy. The Humanist Tradition. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980. (Noted as RAP) Marà ­as, Julià ¡n. Philosophy As Dramatic Theory. tr. James Parsons. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971. (Noted as PADT) Sagan, Eli. The Honey and the Hemlock. Democracy and Paranoia in Ancient Athens and Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Sedgewick, G.G. Of Irony, Especially in Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967. Tejera, V. Plato's Dialogues One By One. A Structural Interpretation. New York: Irvington Publishers, Inc., 1984. (Noted as PDOBO) —. Modes of Greek Thought. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971. Walton, Craig and Anton, John, eds. Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1974.