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Plato's Euthydemus begins with Crito desiring to know with whom Socrates was conversing yesterday at the Lyceum. Socrates reveals it was not one but two, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus. He claims the pair is ultra-wise and that Crito should come with him to be their students. Yet, his narration of his dialogue with them displays them more as clowns than philosophers. Their virtue involves universal refutation. Given x, they will show not-x; given not-x, they will show x. For example, in the first half of the dialogue, they corrupt young Cleinias by teaching him that the wise are both learned and unlearned. In spite of this waffling, Socrates insists that the pair is serious---perhaps because being learned and unlearned is part and parcel to knowledge of ignorance At the end of the dialogue, Crito discloses that he is divided about whether to send his son to school. Socrates has already indicated that it is Crito himself who ought to enroll. The motor of the dialogue seems to be that the too playful (Euthydemus and Dionysodorus) must be shown to be serious and the too serious (Crito) must be shown to be playful. One might think in formulae: playful/serious, philosophical/political, practical/theoretical, comedy/tragedy, philosopher/sophist. Everyone agrees that Socrates is the philosopher-hero and Euthydemus and Dionysodorus are the sophistic villains. However, Socrates looks a great deal akin to the pair Halfway through the Euthydemus, Crito interrupts to accuse Socrates of inventing speeches. He later admits that, while he finds philosophy good, its practitioners (i.e., Socrates) look strange. One assumes from the Crito and the Phaedo that Crito is Socrates' friend. But Crito cannot sync his regard for Socrates with his disagreement with his profession. He cannot make Socrates singular and he does not know where to send his son to make him singular. His concern over conflicted beings leads him into dialogue. The same concern motivates Euthydemus and Dionysodorus to propose they can neutralize any 'one' they encounter. The puzzle is to see how contradiction is behind both dialogue and execution, and so how Plato's silliest dialogue holds the weight of Socrates' trial and death / acase@tulane.edu

<p>This dissertation investigates how recognition of Plato's <italic>Republic</italic> as a pedagogical text and of the milieu of competing disciplines in which it composed suggests new readings of its philosophical content. I contend that close attention to the cultural context in which the <italic>Republic</italic> was written reveals the degree to which its arguments were constructed not only with an eye towards the philosophical demands put upon it, but also in response to the claims of epistemological authority made by other fields. Furthermore, I show that close attention to the pedagogical function of the text reveals the degree to which Plato relies upon the dialogue's characters and figurative language to entice students away from alternative pursuits and world-views and towards Platonic philosophy.</p><p> The <italic>Republic</italic> was constructed in a revolutionary period for both texts and teachers, in which texts were beginning to function as a kind of tutor. In my first chapter, "Educating Athens", I survey the changing Athenian attitudes towards education from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE, with a special focus on the rise of the concept of paideia. I also consider some of the ways in which earlier scholars have regarded the <italic>Republic</italic> as a prescriptive text on education in order to distinguish their approaches from my own: unlike these earlier readings, my approach to the text is to regard it as itself educating the reader, rather than as describing a system of education. The development of systems of paideia is intimately connected to the phenomena discussed in my second chapter: the rise of disciplines and the explosion of the written word. I conduct a historical survey of the evidence for literacy and texts in the seventh to fourth centuries BCE and show that the gradual increase in texts and literacy did not replace oral culture in Athens, but rather supplemented it. I point out striking similarities among medical texts, oratorical works, and the Socratic dialogues written by Plato's contemporaries as a basis for comparison with Plato's <italic>Republic</italic>.</p><p> In the final three chapters of my dissertation I examine three aspects of Plato's <italic>Republic</italic> which have presented problems for envisioning the <italic>Republic</italic> as a unified work. My third chapter examines the Socratic interlocutors of book one as negative models for the reader, and shows that by the end of the book Plato has demonstrated the importance of passion, creativity, and deference in the successful philosophical student. As well, I suggest that Plato deliberately shows the weaknesses of the elenchus in the first book in order to argue against the methodologies of his fellow authors of Socratic dialogues, and in order to showcase the new philosophical methods which he displays in the remainder of the <italic>Republic</italic>. In the fourth chapter I continue to emphasize the relationship between the philosophy of the <italic>Republic</italic> and the work's pedagogical mission by examining the "two starts" to the <italic>Republic</italic> at the beginning of book 2 and book 5. I show that important work is done in books 2-4 to prepare the reader for the radical reevaluation of knowledge that will come in books 5-7 In the fifth chapter I consider the use of stories within the <italic>Republic</italic>, and what such stories can tell us both about Plato's theories of how education occurs as well as about how the <italic>Republic</italic> is meant to function. </p><p> Ultimately my dissertation demonstrates that by locating the <italic>Republic</italic> within the intersection of competing pedagogies, new disciplines, and the recent rise of texts, the text can be understood as functioning on a number of different levels. It dismisses the merits of other disciplines and privileges Plato over other philosophers, all within the structure of a work which is gradually molding and guiding its reader towards Plato's particular ethical and epistemological system. Although the <italic>Republic</italic> has been read as a work on ethics, on political philosophy, and on psychology, its disparate components and topics coalesce only by reading it first as a work which educates.</p> / Dissertation

This study describes the religious content of the Ciceronian corpus and reappraises Cicero’s religious stance. Chapter 1 develops a working definition of religion in terms of interested supernatural agents, briefly situating it within the historiography of religion. Support for this definition from scholars in a range of academic disciplines is demonstrated. It is then engaged in Chapter 2 as a tool with which to locate and classify religious material in the Ciceronian corpus, approaching the texts genre by genre and indicating certain difficulties encountered when seeking to divide the religious from the non-religious. Religion in Cicero now defined, Chapter 3 considers the limitations in scope and methodology of previous research on the topic, arguing that these limitations call for a new approach but also suggest how it should proceed. The corpus must be considered as a whole, with twin objectives: to describe and account for conflicting religious viewpoints within and between individual works, and to establish whether a coherent authorial religious position exists. Cicero generally presents religion as beneficial to society, but never expressly sets out to elucidate the reasoning behind this recurrent proposition or collects in one place those beliefs and practices that are repeatedly advocated. Chapter 4 combines disparate Ciceronian material to show how social utility is thought to accrue and how it is predicated upon a surprisingly large and specific body of religious doctrine. This doctrine amounts to a dominant religious ideology; its operation in practice and its substantial resemblance to Roman orthodoxy are illustrated in Chapter 5, a case study on Cicero’s use of religious rhetoric in connection with the Catilinarian conspiracy. Chapter 6 details the similarities and many conflicts between the dominant religious ideology and the religious viewpoints of the Stoics, Epicureans and Philonian Academics as each school is portrayed by Cicero. Finally, Chapter 7 argues that a coherent authorial attitude to religion is present, which maps closely onto the dominant religious ideology and is characterized by a consistent and spirited endorsement of traditional Roman religion in full awareness of competing rational arguments from Greek philosophy. Some possible explanations for this attitude conclude the study. / The Classics