Abstract

The Effects of Plato's Republic deals with problems of pedagogy that arise out of Socrates' practice of dialectical questioning. More specifically, the dissertation focuses on the structure and function of mimesis, as exemplified by the Socratic critique of poetry and mythology. Through a discussion of the deception characteristic of false logos, I develop an interpretation of the myth of the cave that discloses a play of difference in nature as in thought, and identifies as a simulacrum the idea of the good that serves both as the arche and the telos of philosophical education. I argue that Plato's image of philosophy appears in excess of the law of non-contradiction and its attendant institutions of linear time and developmental history, and I claim that the question of repetition posed by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze originates in ancient philosophy with irony, that is in Socrates' endeavor simultaneously to conceal and reveal the love of wisdom by practicing the acticing the dialectic