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Plato II - Phaedrus II

Plato II - Phaedrus II

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 In this lecture on Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates and Phaedrus pause under a plane tree in the midday heat when Socrates hears the cicadas singing, and tells the myth of men who were so carried away by the first music of the Muses that they forgot to eat and became the first cicadas. Roger reads the myth through Marsilio Ficino's Renaissance commentary, published 500 years before this talk. Ficino treats the cicadas as an allegory for airy spirits who live by contemplation and praise. From there, we follow the nine Muses as nine stages of philosophic inquiry, culminating with Apollo, and then traces their transformation into the nine celestial orders of Dionysius the Areopagite, including the origin of the word "angel," with links to Hermeticism and the Botticelli paintings. It returns to the dialogue's central claim that love and language are bound together, and that only truth spoken to someone and "written on the soul of the hearer" has lasting value, far more than anything written down.

More information about these presentations can be found at
https://sharedpresencefoundation.org/presentations/plato
https://sharedpresencefoundation.org/presentations/platos-theory-of-education
https://sharedpresencefoundation.org/presentations/plato-ii

More presentations by Roger Weir are available at the Shared Presence Foundation website and on our YouTube channel
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