TY - BOOK ID - 75678492 TI - Preface to Plato PY - 2022 SN - 0674699068 9780674038431 0674038436 9780674699069 9780674699069 0674699009 PB - Cambridge, MA DB - UniCat KW - Philosophy, Ancient. KW - Greek poetry KW - Ancient philosophy KW - Greek philosophy KW - Philosophy, Greek KW - Philosophy, Roman KW - Roman philosophy KW - History and criticism. KW - Plato. KW - Plato KW - Platon KW - Aflāṭūn KW - Aplaton KW - Bolatu KW - Platonas KW - Platone KW - Po-la-tʻu KW - Pʻŭllatʻo KW - Pʻŭllatʻon KW - Pʻuratʻon KW - Πλάτων KW - אפלטון KW - פלאטא KW - פלאטאן KW - פלאטו KW - أفلاطون KW - 柏拉圖 KW - 플라톤 KW - Платон KW - プラトン KW - Political and social views. KW - Filosofía antigua. KW - Poesia griega KW - Historia y crítica. KW - Platón UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:75678492 AB - Plato’s frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Eric Havelock shows that Plato’s hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought. The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction—Mr. Havelock shows how the Iliad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative. The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science. ER -