Logos: Discourse or Reason? The Forms of Platonic Dialectics

Abstract

The problem discussed in the study is part of the polemics connected with the so-called “Platonic question,” to be precise, it seeks to prove that the so-called two Platonic “critiques” of the writing/text (Plato’s Phaedrus, 275c ff., Letter VII 341c ff.) are not sufficient evidence that, according to Plato, dialectic procedures to discover and know the first forms of being may be realised only in a sensu stricto dialogue, in the act of living speech, and they cannot be fixed in a writing/text. On the basis of the Platonic descriptions of dialectic procedures three forms of dialectic skill (διαλεκτικὴ τέχνη) have been distinguished: synoptic dialectics, which is always a kind of propedeuctics of research in the form of ordering the results of sense perception in sets and trying to find in them a criterion of possibility for this ordering in the form of something one; hypothetical dialectics that calls for a thesis whose object is the ontic status of this one, where it is, and how to verify this thesis in a reliable manner; and diairetic dialectics that allows to elicit from the most general concept some definitions of concrete objects. By analysing the descriptions of dialectic procedures in Platonic texts, numerous statements of the Philosopher himself in the mouth of Socrates, or the Guest of Elea, we may conclude whether these procedures are carried out exclusively in the philosopher’s intellect, and Platonic dialogues are their written form “for voices,” or else they have, among other things, didactic purposes.