The Musical Structure of Plato's Dialogues

by Kennedy,J.B.

• ISBN13: 9781844652679
• ISBN10: 184465267X
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2014-08-14
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Kennedy shows that Plato gave his dialogues a similar musical structure, dividing each dialogue into twelve parts and inserting symbols at each twelfth to mark a musical note. These passages are either harmonious or dissonant and traverse the ups and downs of a known musical scale. Many of Plato's early followers insisted that Plato used symbols to conceal his own views within the dialogues, but modern scholars have denied this. Kennedy, an expert in Pythagorean mathematics and music theory, is able to show that Plato's dialogues contain a system of symbols that are undetectable by those without knowledge of obsolete Greek mathematics. The book begins with a concise and accessible introduction to Plato's symbolic schemes and the role of allegory in ancient times. The author then annotates the musical symbols in two of Plato's most popular dialogues, the Symposium and Euthyphro, and shows that Plato used the musical scale as an outline for structuring his narratives.

Author Biography

J. B. kennedy lectures in the Centre for the History of Science, technology and Medicine at the university of Manchester. He studied mathematics at Princeton and took his doctorate in philosophy at Stanford. He is the author of Space, Time and Einstein (Acumen, 2002).

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xii
Abbreviations	p. xvii
The nature and history of philosophical allegory	p. 1
Rehabilitating ancient ways of reading	p. 2
Allegory, Socrates and Plato	p. 5
Symbols, reserve and Pythagoreanism	p. 9
Persecution and the politics of allegory in classical Athens	p. 12
Plato and Pythagoreanism: two puzzles	p. 14
The allegorical Plato in history	p. 18
Methodological precedent: early Christianity	p. 23
Methodological precedent: Renaissance Platonism	p. 25
Introducing the dialogues' musical structure	p. 29
Structuring a dialogue	p. 31
Ancient Greek music: three key ideas	p. 32
Plato's symbolic scheme	p. 36
Harmony and consonance, disharmony and dissonance	p. 37
Sevenths and mixture	p. 38
Guide to the strongest evidence	p. 40
Methodology for line-counting	p. 45
Canons of criticism	p. 46
Responses to possible objections	p. 48
Independent lines of evidence	p. 52
Simple, objective measurements	p. 52
Parallel passages at the same relative location	p. 54
Ranges of positive and negative concepts	p. 56
Preview of the musical structure in the Republic	p. 57
A control: falsifiability and the pseudo-Platonica	p. 59
An emphatic pattern in the Sympostum's frame	p. 61
A theory of music	p. 62
Recurring clusters of features in the frame	p. 63
A new kind of commentary	p. 64
Making the Symposium's musical structure explicit	p. 78
phaedrus	p. 78
Pausanias	p. 84
Eryximachus	p. 96
Aristophanes	p. 104
Agathon	p. 116
Socrates and Diotima	p. 126
Alcibiades	p. 154
Parallel structure in the Euthyphro	p. 178
The same scale and the same symbolic scheme	p. 178
Guide to the strongest evidence	p. 179
The sevenths	p. 180
The connection to music	p. 181
Another kind of evidence: parallels between dialogues	p. 183
The Euthyphro is not aporetic	p. 184
Marking the notes	p. 185
Extracting doctrine from structure	p. 236
Aristotle on virtues and means	p. 236
Stichometry and the divided line	p. 238
Reading the dialogues in parallel	p. 240
The logic of the argument and its consequences	p. 241
Some implications	p. 244
Summary of the case	p. 244
Interpreting the: dialogues	p. 245
Problems with anonymity and intentionality	p. 246
Interpreting Plato, Pythagoras and Socrates	p. 247
History of music and mathematics	p. 249
History of literature and literary theory	p. 251
Ancient book production, papyrology, textual studies	p. 251
The forward path	p. 252
More musicological background	p. 253
Neo-Pythagoreans, the twelve-note scale and the monochord	p. 260
Markers between the major notes	p. 265
The central notes	p. 271
Systematic theory of the marking passages	p. 274
Structure in Agathon and Socrates' speeches	p. 287
Euripides and line-counting	p. 288
Data from the Republic	p. 291
OCT line numbers for the musical notes	p. 294
Notes	p. 297
Bibliography	p. 309
Index	p. 315
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.