Published: 2006-12-31

Plato's dialogue as a way of philosophising

Rafał Katamay

Abstract

The aim of the article is to explain the reason why Plato treated a dialogue as the best means of a written form of transmiting a philosophical content. It also constitutes a contribution to the understanding of Plato's way of philosophising. The author emphasises that both a dialogue and dialectics have a joint structure composed of questions and answers, and, thus, constitute the basic method of philosophy, i.e. the process of moving towards wisdom. The process of philosophising takes place when moving from the state of unknown to wisdom, i.e. from capturing difficulties to their solutions. It is dia-logical in nature after all; it assumes the thought movement from one logos already included in the question to the other inserted in the answer. The ultimate goal of the dialogue, going beyond its scope, is the stoppage of thinking and mental view of the essence explaining everything. The author discriminates between three forms of dialogue: an internal one (taking place in mind within itself), a spoken one (articulated in a conversation of two people) and a written one (presented in writing but requiring animation and continuation in the reader). The conclusion part says that Plato used a dialogue to express not only his most vital philosophical views, but the problems a thinking person faces in the world, and ways of solving them, encouraging the reader to follow them.

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Katamay, R. (2006). Plato’s dialogue as a way of philosophising. Folia Philosophica, 24, 67–88. https://doi.org/10.31261/fp.20971

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Domyślna okładka

Vol. 24 (2006)
Published: 2006-12-31


ISSN: 1231-0913
eISSN: 2353-9445
Ikona DOI 10.31261/fp

Publisher
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

Licence CC Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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