Plato's Animals Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and Other Philosophical Beasts

About this book

Plato's Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato's Dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato's work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato's understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. Plato's Animals includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato s bestiary in both Greek and English.

Contents

Editors’ Introduction: Plato’s Menagerie

Part I. The Animal of Fable and Myth
1. Making Music with Aesop’s Fables in the Phaedo Heidi Northwood
2. “Talk to the Animals”: On the Myth of Kronos in the Statesman David Farrell Krell

Part II. Socrates as muops and narke
3. American Gadfly: Plato and the Problem of Metaphor Michael Naas
4. Till Human Voices Wake Us and We Drown: The Aporia-fish in the Meno Thomas Thorp

Part III. The Socratic Animal as Truth-Teller and Provocateur
5. We the Bird-Catchers: Receiving the Truth in the Phaedo and the Apology Shane Ewegen
6. The Dog on the Fly H. Peter Steeves

Part IV. The Political Animal
7. Taming Horses and Desires: Plato’s Politics of Care Jeremy Bell
8. Who Let the Dogs Out? Tracking the Philosophical Life among the Wolves and Dogs of the Republic Christopher Long

Part V. The (En)gendered Animal
9. The City of Sows and Sexual Differentiation in the Republic Marina McCoy
10. Animality and Sexual Difference in the Timaeus Sarah Brill

Part VI. The Philosophical Animal
11. Animal Sacrifice in Plato’s Later Methodology Holly Moore
12. The Animals That Therefore We Were? Aristophanes’ Double Creatures
and the Question of Origins Drew Hyland

Part VII. Animals and the Afterlife
13. Animals and Angels: The Myth of Life as a Whole in Republic 10 Claudia Baracchi
14. Of Beasts and Heroes: The Promiscuity of Humans and Animals in the Myth of Er Francisco Gonzalez

List of Contributors
Index
Plato's Animal Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Jeremy Bell is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University. Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. He is author of Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media and Derrida From Now On.