The suggestive vision of Plato’s thought offered us by the author is framed by perfectly identifiable co-ordinates: an anthropological foundation of his philosophical thought, an interpretation of subjectivity and consciousness from a transcendental viewpoint, and, finally, a concept of ontology in which the Leitfaden comes to be the polarity between being and existence, much like Heidegger’s "Ontological Difference." It is, then, not strange that Plato’s philosophy should be analyzed from the standpoint of a double tension, the tension existing between the (...) order of the "transcendental" and the order of the "ground," and that between an ontology of being and an ontology of existence. (shrink)

In this fascinating but mildly repetitious book, Havelock suggests that Homeric Greece was characterized by an oral culture in which the standards, history and techniques of the society were preserved and transmitted through a continuous process of memorization, repetition and recall. The material preserved was necessarily embodied in visualized particular acts and events within the narrative context of the epic. Havelock maintains that Plato's attack on the poets in The Republic was the first totally conscious rejection of this poetic mode (...) of consciousness, in which general conceptual thought is impossible, in favor of abstract language and a new intellectual mode in which the autonomous rational personality apprehends objects of knowledge which are revealed through the integration and abstraction of particulars. This attack is seen as the culmination of a process which reveals itself in Hesiod and the pre-Socratics and terminates in the emergence of conceptual language and philosophical discourse in Platonic Greece.—T. C. (shrink)