Aither is a double-blind peer review, Open Access online academic journal. It is indexed at ERIH+ and Scopus. It is published by the Faculty of Arts of the Palacký University in Olomouc in cooperation with the Philosophical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It comes out twice a year. Every second issue is international and contains foreign-language articles (mainly in English, but also in German and French). The journal is registered under the number ISSN 1803-7860.

Aither 15/2016:30-45 | DOI: 10.5507/aither.2016.002

Popper and Stránský on Interpreting Plato

Josef Moural
Univerzita Jana Evangelisty Purkyně v Ústí nad Labem

Popper more or less abandoned the field of Plato interpretation after 1945, restricting himself to a few corrections and additions and to mostly formal replies to Levinson and Wild. Today, his Plato interpretation is often neglected or considered just an oddity. I defend Popper against two objections raised recently by Jiří Stránský: that (1) his campaigning against modern totalitarianism is unacceptable as a viewpoint for dealing with Plato, and that (2) Popper neglects the dramatic reading approach. I show that Popper is in fact - regardless of how controversial his particular arguments are - not naive but quite sophisticated methodologically (and close to Jan Patočka) on the first issue. Finally, I discuss the shortcomings of both the one-sided 'dramatist' and the 'argumentist' approaches and propose a more fruitful distinction between straight reading ascribing to Plato what appears to be the winning persuasive content of the dialogue (argumentative, rhetorical, mythopoetical) on the one hand, and oblique reading dissociating him from it, on the other.

Published: March 30, 2016  Show citation

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Moural, J. (2016). Popper and Stránský on Interpreting Plato. Aither, 8(15), 30-45. doi: 10.5507/aither.2016.002
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