The Seventh Socratic Symposium
on
Plato’s Philebos
or man as a frame of mind
7 November 2012
Political Anthropology Workshop on Plato’s Birthday
Organised by the Marsilio Ficino Association
and the journal International Political Anthropology
Convener Agnes Horvath
“Plato was the first European thinker to produce a body of writings that survived in its entirety and is
discussed up till now. Still, time and again his work is ignored and bypassed in two opposite and yet
closely related ways: it is either canonised, dogmatically, as the founder of philosophical idealism, the
source of serious, ‘rational’ thinking; or it is heroised as the eternal utopian. A combination of these
excesses repeatedly led to a loss of serious interest in his ideas. With a series of symposia organised each
year since 2006 on Plato’s birthday (November 7) around a single Platonic dialogue we are reconsidering
the vital significance of Plato for our contemporary world”
(from the first Symposium Call)
About the IPA-AMF Workshop series: The Dialogues selected so far form a kind of
symphonic structure, sharing a complementary focus. The ‘First Symposium’ was
devoted to the Ion, with the emphasis placed on mimetic art. For the ‘Second
Symposium’ we selected the Statesman, posing the question of the ‘Ge-genesis’ of the
statesmen, and the problems created by the contagious proliferation of mimetic politics
in democratic Athens. The ‘Third Symposium’ discussed the Timaeus, focusing on the
notion of Place or Space (khóra), which renders possible every genesis, but also the
materialisation of its falsifications. The ‘Fourth Symposium’, devoted to the Sophist,
discussed the Mask as a symptom of imitativeness. Plato there directly tackles the
paradox of nothingness, or how and why to discuss something that does not exist.
Ontological and existential nothingness belongs to the very nature of the Sophist, who
possesses the remarkable ability of representing and thus conjuring up the non-existent
as local and vice versa. Plato emphasises that false statements may seem to be true, thus
calling attention to the fact that our understanding of reality can be just as problematic as
that of non-reality.
The 5th Symposium turned to the Symposium itself, in order to provide
a new angle on the debate on love, focusing on the formative and transformative, thus
also educative, aspects of Eros. Last year we were calling attention to another, closely
related dimension in Plato’s thought; how the mind functions according to your
emotions, through the example of mass sensations or Theatrocracy.
The atmosphere is an authentic symposium, in the spirit of Socrates, in which a
variety of approaches to Plato’s ideas will feature. Philosophers, political scientists,
historians of thought, lawyers, sociologists and anthropologists all make contributions.
The Symposium will be on Plato’s Philebos, focusing on 14A-35C, where the
questions expressed in the title of this Call appear about the infinitely divisible matter, of
which every bit can become anything and every parts of it mix with others, except for a
higher mind that has power over everything and which does not mix with others, being
alone by itself, although it is possible to intuit it by the right frame of mind. This
intuition is the topic of the Philebos: how to recall the form of good, which is ontologically
separate from us, but can be reached through understanding.
Participants are encouraged to read related papers: www.politicalanthropology.org
Application deadline: 31 October, 2011; to ah701@cam.ac.uk
CONTACT INFORMATION
