Preliminary Stages or Final Destinations? Plutarch’s Remarks on the Subjects of Most Interest to Beginners in Philosophy
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In his influential doctoral dissertation Fritz Krauss adopted Rudolf Hirzel’s view that as a young man Plutarch had turned from the study of rhetoric to the study of philosophy. His aim was to establish that any of Plutarch’s surviving texts that display explicit traces of rhetorical conventions date to his early years. However, Krauss provided only one piece of positive evidence to support Hirzel’s conjecture: a passage from On Progress in Virtue. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that, upon closer examination, this passage does not depict engagement with rhetoric as a preliminary stage in the education of young men, but rather, it describes the opposite process.
Source: Ploutarchos
Author: Theofanis Tsiampokalos
Institution: Universität Trier
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4405994778