The musical structure of Plato's dialogues / J.B. Kennedy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kennedy, J. B. (John Bernard), 1958-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plato--Criticism and interpretation.

Plato.

Rhetoric.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (337 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Acumen Publishing, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

J. B. Kennedy argues that Plato''s dialogues have an unsuspected musical structure and use symbols to encode Pythagorean doctrines. The followers of Pythagoras famously thought that the cosmos had a hidden musical structure and that wise philosophers would be able to hear this harmony of the spheres. Kennedy shows that Plato gave his dialogues a similar, hidden musical structure. He divided each dialogue into twelve parts and inserted symbols at each twelfth to mark a musical note. These passages are relatively harmonious or dissonant, and so traverse the ups and downs of a known musical scale

Contents:

Cover; Half Title; Series Page; Title Page; Copyright Page; Dedication; Table of Contents; Preface; Abbreviations; 1. The nature and history of philosophical allegory; 1.1 Rehabilitating ancient ways of reading; 1.2 Allegory, Socrates and Plato; 1.3 Symbols, reserve and Pythagoreanism; 1.4 Persecution and the politics of allegory in classical Athens; 1.5 Plato and Pythagoreanism: two puzzles; 1.6 The allegorical Plato in history; 1.7 Methodological precedent: early Christianity; 1.8 Methodological precedent: Renaissance Platonism; 2. Introducing the dialogues' musical structure

2.1 Structuring a dialogue2.2 Ancient Greek music: three key ideas; 2.3 Plato's symbolic scheme; 2.4 Harmony and consonance, disharmony and dissonance; 2.5 Sevenths and mixture; 2.6 Guide to the strongest evidence; 2.7 Methodology for line-counting; 2.8 Canons of criticism; 2.9 Responses to possible objections; 3. Independent lines of evidence; 3.1 Simple, objective measurements; 3.2 Parallel passages at the same relative location; 3.3 Ranges of positive and negative concepts; 3.4 Preview of the musical structure in the Republic; 3.5 A control: falsifiability and the pseudo-Platonica

4. An emphatic pattern in the Symposium's frame4.1 A theory of music; 4.2 Recurring clusters of features in the frame; 4.3 A new kind of commentary; 5. Making the Symposium's musical structure explicit; 5.1 Phaedrus; 5.2 Pausanias; 5.3 Eryximachus; 5.4 Aristophanes; 5.5 Agathon; 5.6 Socrates and Diotima; 5.7 Alcibiades; 6. Parallel structure in the Euthyphro; 6.1 The same scale and the same symbolic scheme; 6.2 Guide to the strongest evidence; 6.3 The sevenths; 6.4 The connection to music; 6.5 Another kind of evidence: parallels between dialogues; 6.6 The Euthyphro is not aporetic

6.7 Marking the notes7. Extracting doctrine from structure; 7.1 Aristotle on virtues and means; 7.2 Stichometry and the divided line; 7.3 Reading the dialogues in parallel; 7.4 The logic of the argument and its consequences; 8. Some implications; 8.1 Summary of the case; 8.2 Interpreting the dialogues; 8.3 Problems with anonymity and intentionality; 8.4 Interpreting Plato, Pythagoras and Socrates; 8.5 History of music and mathematics; 8.6 History of literature and literary theory; 8.7 Ancient book production, papyrology, textual studies; 8.8 The forward path

Appendix 1: More musicological backgroundAppendix 2: Neo-Pythagoreans, the twelve-note scale and the monochord; Appendix 3: Markers between the major notes; Appendix 4: The central notes; Appendix 5: Systematic theory of the marking passages; Appendix 6: Structure in Agathon and Socrates' speeches; Appendix 7: Euripides and line-counting; Appendix 8: Data from the Republic; Appendix 9: OCT line numbers for the musical notes; Notes; Bibliography; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-314) and index.

Description based on metadata supplied by the publisher and other sources.

ISBN:

1-315-73012-X

1-317-54798-5

9781315730127

OCLC:

793806521