Although the Socratic method is commonly understood as a style of pedagogy involving cross-questioning between teacher and student, there has long been debate among scholars of ancient philosophy ...about how this method as attributed to Socrates should be defined or, indeed, whether Socrates can be said to have used any single, uniform method at all distinctive to his way of philosophizing. This volume brings together essays by classicists and philosophers examining this controversy anew.
The point of departure for many of those engaged in the debate has been the identification of Socratic method with the elenchus as a technique of logical argumentation aimed at refuting an interlocutor, which Gregory Vlastos highlighted in an influential article in 1983. The essays in this volume look again at many of the issues to which Vlastos drew attention but also seek to broaden the discussion well beyond the limits of his formulation.
Some contributors question the suitability of the elenchus as a general description of how Socrates engages his interlocutors; others trace the historical origins of the kinds of argumentation Socrates employs; others explore methods in addition to the elenchus that Socrates uses; several propose new ways of thinking about Socratic practices. Eight essays focus on specific dialogues, each examining why Plato has Socrates use the particular methods he does in the context defined by the dialogue. Overall, representing a wide range of approaches in Platonic scholarship, the volume aims to enliven and reorient the debate over Socratic method so as to set a new agenda for future research.
Contributors are Hayden W. Ausland, Hugh H. Benson, Thomas C. Brickhouse, Michelle Carpenter, John M. Carvalho, Lloyd P. Gerson, Francisco J. Gonzalez, James H. Lesher, Mark McPherran, Ronald M. Polansky, Gerald A. Press, François Renaud, and W. Thomas Schmid, Nicholas D. Smith, P. Christopher Smith, Harold Tarrant, Joanne B. Waugh, and Charles M. Young.
In Plato's Apology, Socrates says he spent his life examining and questioning people on how best to live, while avowing that he himself knows nothing important. Elsewhere, however, for example in ...Plato's Republic, Plato's Socrates presents radical and grandiose theses. In this book Sandra Peterson offers a hypothesis which explains the puzzle of Socrates' two contrasting manners. She argues that the apparently confident doctrinal Socrates is in fact conducting the first step of an examination: by eliciting his interlocutors' reactions, his apparently doctrinal lectures reveal what his interlocutors believe is the best way to live. She tests her hypothesis by close reading of passages in the Theaetetus, Republic and Phaedo. Her provocative conclusion, that there is a single Socrates whose conception and practice of philosophy remain the same throughout the dialogues, will be of interest to a wide range of readers in ancient philosophy and classics.
Plato famously promised a final dialogue in the series Sophist-Statesman, a series aiming to define three sorts of experts — the sophist, statesman, and philosopher — but the final dialogue on the ...philosopher is missing. This book argues that Plato promised the Philosopher but did not write it to stimulate his audience to work out the portrait it would have contained. The Sophist and Statesman are themselves members of a larger series starting with the Theaetetus, Plato’s investigation of knowledge, and the whole series relies on the Parmenides, whose second part presents a philosophical exercise, introduced as the first step in a larger philosophical program. This book contends that the dialogues in the series leading up to the missing Philosopher, though they reach some substantive conclusions, are philosophical exercises of various sorts designed to train students in dialectic, the philosopher’s method; and that a second version of the Parmenides exercise, closely patterned on it, spans parts of the Theaetetus and Sophist and brings the philosopher into view. This is the exercise about being, the subject-matter studied by Plato’s philosopher. Plato hides the pieces of the puzzle and its solution in plain sight, forcing his students (and us modern readers) to dig out the pieces and reconstruct the project. In finding the philosopher through the exercise, the student becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods, and thus the target of the exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose.
This cutting-edge collection of articles provides the first organised reflection on the language of films and television series across British, American and Italian cultures. The volume suggests new ...directions for research and applications, and offers a variety of methodologies and perspectives on the complexities of "telecinematic" discourse - a hitherto virtually unexplored area of investigation in linguistics. The papers share a common vision of the big and small screen: the belief that the discourses of film and television offer a re-presentation of our world. As such, telecinematic texts reorganise and recreate language (together with time and space) in their own way and with respect to specific socio-cultural conventions and media logic. The volume provides a multifaceted, yet coherent insight into the diegetic - as it revolves around narrative - as opposed to mimetic - as referring to other non-narrative and non-fictional genres - discourses of fictional media. The collection will be of interest to researchers, tutors and students in pragmatics, stylistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, communication studies and related fields.
The last two decades have witnessed a remarkable growth of interest in what are variously termed discourse markers or discourse particles. The greatest area of growth has centered on particles that ...occur in sentence-initial or turn-initial position, and this interest intersects with a long-standing focus in Conversation Analysis on turn-taking and turn-construction. This volume brings together conversation analytic studies of turn-initial particles in interactions in fourteen languages geographically widely distributed (Europe, America, Asia and Australia). The contributions show the significance of turn-initial particles in three key areas of turn and sequence organization: (i) the management of departures from expected next actions, (ii) the projection of the speaker's epistemic stance, and (iii) the management of overall activities implemented across sequences. Taken together the papers demonstrate the crucial importance of the positioning of particles within turns and sequences for the projection and management of social actions, and for relationships between speakers.
Combining statistical modelling and archival study, English and Empire investigates how African diasporic, Chinese, and Indian characters have been voiced in British fiction and drama produced ...between 1768 and 1929. The analysis connects patterns of linguistic representation to changes in the imperial political economy, to evolving language ideologies that circulate in the Anglophone world, and to shifts in sociocultural anxieties that crosscut race and empire. In carrying out his investigation, David West Brown makes the case for a methodological approach that links the distant (quantitative) and close (qualitative) reading of diverse digital artefacts. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book will appeal to a variety of scholars and students including sociolinguists interested in historical language variation, as well as literary scholars interested in postcolonial studies and the digital humanities.
This is the first book dedicated to the study of the complexities that arise in embodied interaction from the multiplicity of time-scales on which its component processes unfold. It shows in ...microscopic detail how people synchronize and sequence modal resources such as talk, gaze, gesture, and object-manipulation to accomplish social actions. The studies show that each of these resources has its own temporal trajectory, affordances and restrictions, which enable and constrain the fine-grained work of bodily self-organization and interaction with others. Focusing on extended interactional time scales, some of the contributors investigate ways in which larger interactional episodes and relationships between actions are brought about and how actions build on shared interactional histories. The book makes a strong case for the use of video in the study of social interaction. It proposes an enlarged vision of Conversation Analysis that puts the body and its interactive temporalities center stage.
Gregorio Magno, obispo de Roma entre el 590 y el 604 se caracterizó, entre otras cosas, por su capacidad de constituir diversos textos, orientados a diferentes auditorios. En esta breve presentación ...analizaremos las características específicas de cada obra gregoriana, enfatizando el vínculo entre mensaje y destinatario. De este modo mostraremos la utilidad, a la hora de "hacer hablar a los documentos", de conocer el auditorio imaginado por un autor a la hora de concebir sus discursos.
Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome between 590 and 604, was well known, among other things, by his aptitude to produce various texts orientated to different audiences. In this brief communication we will analyze the specific patterns of each of his works, remarking the link between message and receptor. Thus, we will show how important is to know the audience pictured by an author at the moment of conceiving his speeches, as well as when historians "ask the documents to speak".
