Notes While Reading Catherine Zuckert: Plato's Philosophers
I am overjoyed with the dramatic approach to reading the dialogues as showing the story of Socrates, and already with the suggestion that Phaedrus comes after Symposium. That the Laws comes FIRST, chronologically, rather than last, and has reference ONLY to pre-Socratic and NOT Socratic philosophy blows open a certain aspect of the Laws.
Zuckert directs me to Strauss, Symposium, pp. 186-191 on daimonia, and I'm blown away again! The "gods" are spitits- in Phaedrus mediators to hyper-ouranian being! Strauss cites Krueger: "that this is really the difference between Christianity and Plato, the mediator is not Christ, it is eros. But it is daimonia in general, and here Socrates seems to find the in-between being that gets him out of the being- not being paradoxes of Parmenides.
Plato could not foresee the Christ and Christianity. Socrates does not do cosmology- he gives us the placeholder of Timaeus, with no idea the gods could be dispensed with or replaced by wisdom, justice, eros,....Republic VI-VII!
Timaeus refers NOT to the republic, but to a discussion that LACKED books V-VII. His cosmology goes with Laws X, showing soul as prior. It is as if Adiemantus and Polemarchus had not grabbed the cloak of Socrates that second time, and they had gone straight from Book IV into Book VIII.
Timaeus is as if Adiemantus and Polemarchus had not grabbed the cloak of Socrates that second time, and they had gone straight from Book IV into Book VIII.
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The cosmology of Plato and Socrates is rather in the allegory of the cave- inside, outside, and the whole: one and two. That Timaeus was read as Plato's cosmology explains a lot.
p. 43: Timaeus and astronomy: Here and especially in Republic: ordering oneself by the contemplation of the heavens is an ANALOGY to philosophy, here and in the Republic, for Plato and Socrates, if not for Timaeus. This is called "antistrophe?"
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