Preface to Plato / Eric A. Havelock.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Havelock, Eric A. (Eric Alfred), 1903-1988.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Plato.

Plato--Political and social views.

Philosophy, Ancient.

Greek poetry--History and criticism.

Greek poetry.

Physical Description:

xiv, 328 p. ; 21 cm.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963.

Summary:

Plato’s frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato’s hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought. The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction—Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative. The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Coments

The Image- Thinkers

Plato on Poetry

Mimesis

Poetry as Preserved Communication

The Homeric Encyclopedia1

Epic as Record versus Epic as Narrative

Hesiod on Poetry

The Oral Sources of the Hellenic Intelligence

The Homeric State of Mind

The Psychology of the Poetic Performance

The Content and Quality of the Poetised Statement

The Necessity Of Platonism

Psyche or the Separation of the Knower from the Known

The Recognition of the Known as 0 bject

Poetry as Opinion

The Origin of the Theory of Forms

'The Supreme Music is Philosophy'

Notes:

Includes bibliography and index.

ISBN:

9780674038431

0674038436

OCLC:

923116764