Plato and the Power of Images

Contributors

Elizabeth Belfiore
Elizabeth Belfiore is Professor Emerita in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her two main research interests are ancient philosophy and Greek tragedy. She has published books on Aristotle's Poetics, on Greek tragedy, on Plato's Socrates, and numerous articles on Greek tragedy and ancient philosophy. Her paper is part of a longer project on Plato's use of Homer.

Douglas Cairns
Douglas Cairns holds the Chair of Classics in the University of Edinburgh. His recent work has concentrated on Sophocles and archaic Greek thought, the lyric poet Bacchylides, and the emotions in Greek society and thought. He is currently finishing a book on Sophocles' Antigone.

Catherine Collobert
Catherine Collobert is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Classical Studies at the University of Ottawa. The editor with P. Destrée and F. Gonzalez of Plato and Myth: Studies on the Use and Status of Platonic Myths, she has published extensively on myth and poetry in Plato, as well as on Homer, including her monograph, Parier sur le temps: la quête héroïque d’immortalité dans l’épopée homérique (Les Belles-Lettres 2011).

Pierre Destrée
Pierre Destrée is a Permanent Researcher at the Fondation belge de la Recherche Scientifique, and Associate Professor at the Université de Louvain (Belgium). He is the author of numerous articles in Greek ethics, and aesthetics. He has co-edited several books, most recently: (with Ch. Bobonich) Akrasia in Greek Philosophy, 2007; (with F.-G. Herrmann) Plato and the Poets, 2011; (with C. Collobert & F. Gonzalez) Plato and Myth, 2012; (with M. Deslauriers) A Cambridge Companion to Aristotle's Politics, 2013.

Louis-André Dorion
Louis-André Dorion is Professeur titulaire of Philosophy at the Université de Montreal. He has published a translation and commentary on Aristotle’s Sophistic Refutations, and his interests in dialectic and sophistic refutation led to his primary research focus in recent years, the character of Socrates, as represented in the works of Xenophon and Plato. He has published on Plato’s Laches, Euthyphro, Charmides, and Lysis, as well as several volumes on Xenophon’s Memorabilia.

Radcliffe G. Edmonds III
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III is the Paul Shorey Professor of Greek and Chair of the Department of Greek, Latin, & Classical Studies at Bryn Mawr College. He has written on eros, midwifery, myth, and elenchos in Plato, on magic and cosmology in the “Mithras Liturgy”, and on various topics relating to Orphica, including the Derveni Papyrus and the gold tablets. He has published Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes, and the ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets, an edited volume of essays entitled The ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets and Greek Religion: Further Along the Path, and Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion. His current project is a study of the category of magic, entitled Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World.

Andrew Ford
Andrew Ford is Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature at Princeton University. His work has focused on the ancient Greek critical tradition, beginning with Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Cornell 1992) studying the picture of song in Homer and moving on to the classical period with The Origins of Criticism: Literary Culture and Poetic Theory in Classical Greece (Princeton 2002). More recently he has explored the interactions between poetic theory and contemporaneous literary production, as in Aristotle as Poet: The Song for Hermias and its Contexts (Oxford 2012), a study of the philosopher’s poetic output in its philosophical and cultural context. Various further aspects of ancient criticism have been examined in over 30 articles, including “Protagoras' Head: Interpreting Philosophic Fragments in Theatetus” which was awarded the Gildersleeve Prize for best article in American Journal of Philology in 1995.

Francisco Gonzalez
Francisco Gonzalez is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He has published Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato's Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (1998) and edited the collection The Third Way: New Directions in Platonic Studies (1995). His recent work has examined the relation of Heidegger to the ancient philosophers, including his recent study, A Question of Dialogue: Plato and Heidegger (2009) and forthcoming work on Aristotle. His researches also focus on the invention of philosophical method in Ancient Greek thought, especially in opposition to rhetoric and poetry and the meaning of ‘eidos’ in Plato and Aristotle.

Elsa Grasso
Elsa Grasso is maître de conférences in Philosophy at the University of Nice. Her doctoral thesis concerned the notions of eikôn and phantasma in the Dialogues, and she has published on various aspects of metaphysics, ontology and aesthetics in Plato: on image, mimesis, myth, or relation between sophistry and truth, including “Images dans le texte: eikonologia platonicienne” (Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale; forthcoming); “Myth, image and likeness in Plato’s Timaeus” (in P. Destrée, C. Collobert, F. Gonzalez [ed.], Plato and Myth, 2012); “Socrate dans le Sophiste de Platon : juge ou prétendant ?” (in L. Rossetti [dir.], Atti delle Giornate di Studio sulla Letteratura socratica antica, 2008); “Platon ou l’aurore des idoles” (in A. Schnell [dir.], L’image, 2007). She has organized conferences at the University of Nice on “Plato and Heidegger” (2008), “Physics and Metaphysics in Aristotle” (2010), and “Mimesis in Plato” (2012).

Richard Hunter
Richard Hunter is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. His research interests include Hellenistic poetry and its reception in Rome, ancient literary criticism, and the ancient novel. His most recent books are Critical Moments in Classical Literature (Cambridge 2009), (with Donald Russell) Plutarch, How to study poetry (De audiendis poetis) (Cambridge 2011), Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature: the silent stream (Cambridge 2012) and Hesiodic Voices: Studies in the Reception of the Works and Days in Antiquity (forthcoming Cambridge 2014). Many of his essays have been collected in On Coming After: Studies in Post-Classical Greek Literature and its Reception (Berlin 2008).

Grace Ledbetter
Grace Ledbetter, Associate Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Swarthmore College, has an A. B. from Bryn Mawr College, an MA in philosophy from The University of Virginia, and a Ph. D. in Classics from Cornell University (1996). She was a Townsend Traveling Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1994-5). She holds a joint appointment in Classics and Philosophy and specializes in Ancient Philosophy and Greek Poetry. Her book, Poetics Before Plato: Interpretation and Authority in Early Greek Theories of Poetry (Princeton University Press 2003), examines theories of poetry in the early Greek literary and philosophical traditions. She has also published articles on causation in Plato, on Achilles and Patroclus in Homer's Iliad, on Sophocles' Antigone, and on the Stoic theory of emotion.

Alex Long
Alex Long is Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews. He works primarily on Plato, Stoicism and ancient political thought. OUP recently published his Conversation and Self-Sufficiency in Plato.

Irmgard Männlein-Robert
Irmgard Männlein-Robert is the Ordentliche Professorin für Griechische Philologie at the Universität Tübingen. She has published Longin. Philologe und Philosoph. Eine Interpretation der erhaltenen Zeugnisse (2001) and Stimme, Schrift und Bild: Zum Verhältnis der Künste in der hellenistischen Dichtung (2007), as well as numerous articles on epigrams, epitaphs, and various aspects of art and philosophy, especially concerning Longinus and Plotinus. She has recently edited a study on the Platonic Axiochus: Ps.-Platon, Über den Tod (2012).

Susan Sauvé Meyer
Susan Sauvé Meyer is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1987 and taught at Harvard University before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. She specializes in Classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, with special interest in the ethical tradition. Her publications include Aristotle on Moral Responsibility (1993; reissued in 2011) and Ancient Ethics (2008), and she is currently writing a translation and commentary on Plato’s Laws, Books I and II.

Christopher Moore
Christopher Moore is Lecturer in Philosophy and in Classics & Mediterranean Studies at Penn State. He works on topics in ancient philosophy and philology connected to the origins of the discipline of "philosophy": self-knowledge, persuasion, the Socratic circle, the history of vocabulary for moral epistemology, Plato's use of poetry and drama, and the intellectual history of Athens reflected in, e.g., the Phaedrus.

Kathryn Morgan
Kathryn A. Morgan is Professor of Classics at UCLA. Her interests range broadly over Greek literature of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, with particular focuses on the dialogues of Plato and the poetry of Pindar. She is the author of Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge, 2000) and many articles on Platonic narrative and its cultural implications. Her most recent book project is Pindar and the Construction of Sicilian Monarchy, forthcoming from Oxford University Press, where she examines Pindar’s victory odes for Hieron of Syracuse and the programs of tyrannical representation to which they contribute.

Penelope Murray
Dr. Penelope Murray was a founder member of the department of Classics at the University of Warwick where she taught for many years, retiring as Senior Lecturer in 2008. Her research interests are in ancient poetics, and classical ideas of creativity, particularly as expressed through myth and metaphor. Recent publications include papers on ‘Tragedy, Women and the Family in Plato’s Republic’ (in Plato and the Poets, eds. Destrée and Hermann), on ‘Paides Malakon Mouson: Tragedy in Plato’s Laws’ (in Performance and Culture in Plato’s Laws, ed. Peponi) and on ‘The Muses in Antiquity’ (in The Muses and their Afterlife in Post-Classical Europe, Warburg Insitute, forthcoming). Current projects include the Blackwell Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, ed. with Pierre Destrée and a book on the Muses for Routledge.

Noburu Notomi
Noburu Notomi is Professor of Philosophy, Keio University, Japan, having received his M.A in Philosophy from University of Tokyo, and his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Cambridge. He has published The Unity of Plato’s Sophist: between the sophist and the philosopher (Cambridge, 1999; Japanese version, Nagoya, 2002) and co-edited with Luc Brisson, Dialogue on Plato’s Politeia (Republic): selected papers from the Ninth Symposium Platonicum (Academia Verlag, 2013). He has also published a number of books and articles on ancient philosophy (especially, sophists, Socratics, and Plato) in Japanese and English.

Zacharoula Petraki
Zacharoula Petraki is a Lecturer in Classics at the Department of Philology, University of Crete, Greece. She has published The Poetics of Philosophical Language: Plato, Poets and Presocratics in the Republic, with De Gruyter, as well as articles on ‘psycho-musicology’ and levels of eikasia in the Republic. Currently she is working on the pictorial and plastic arts as metaphors for philosophic language in Plato’s dialogues, with studies forthcoming on the philosophical ‘paintings’ of the Republic and the public and private lives of the guardians.

Olivier Renaut
Olivier Renaut is currently Maître de conférences in the Université Paris Ouest – Nanterre-La Défense, where he teaches ancient philosophy. His research focuses on Plato’s dialogues, especially Plato’s psychology, ethics and politics, and also contemporary reception of Ancient Ethics. His forthcoming book explores Plato’s use of thumos in several dialogues (Platon:La Médiation des émotions, Paris, Vrin, early 2014).

Gerd Van Riel
Gerd Van Riel, full professor at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven (Belgium), studied classics and philosophy at the Universities of Leuven and Antwerp (PhD 1997), with a dissertation on "Pleasure and the Good. The Influence of Plato's Philebus in antiquity". He lectures on ancient philosophy and also conducts a course on "Fundaments of Philosophy" at the Leuven Faculty of Law. His main research areas are Plato and the Platonic tradition, esp. later Neoplatonism (Proclus, Damascius), and saint Augustine. Professor Van Riel's works include a recent book, Plato’s Gods (2013); a monograph on Pleasure and the Good Life: Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists (2000), which received a Humanities Award of the Royal Belgian Academy, and the Greek-French annotated edition of Damascius, Commentary on the Philebus (2008). He is the author of several articles on ancient philosophy, and on Neoplatonism in particular. He is editor of Augustiniana. A Journal for the Research on Augustine and Augustinianism.

David Wolfsdorf
Prof. Wolfsdorf has recently published Pleasure in Ancient Greek Philosophy (CUP, 2013) as well as a number of articles on related topics. His previous book Trials of Reason: Plato and the Crafting of Philosophy (OUP, 2008) examined Plato's conception of philosophy in the early dialogues. He is currently working on a large project on the nature of ethical theories, part of which is being supported by an ACLS grant for 2013-14 under the title Greek Eudaimonism and Modern Morality.