Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: There is another Socratic method, Socratic mimēsis, and an instance of this is when Plato has Socrates play ‘the annoying questioner’ in the Hippias Major. Other interpreters have suggested that the reasons for Socrates’s dramatic play are depersonalization and distance. I argue for viewing Socrates’s role-playing as a way to dramatize the inner dialogue that happens inside one’s mind in what we may call conscience. Hippias the sophist lacks a conscience: his focus is acquisitive as opposed to inquisitive. Plato has staged a pedagogical theater of Hippias’s failed lesson for the benefit of Plato’s audience, the listeners/readers of the dialogue.
Source: Plato Journal
Author: Mateo Duque
Institution: Binghamton University
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4402408331