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Preface to Plato (History of the Greek Mind,)

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Preface to Plato (History of the Greek Mind,)

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, Mr. 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 Illiad 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.

Country	USA
Author	Eric Havelock
Binding	Kindle Edition
EISBN	9780674038431
Format	Kindle eBook
Label	Belknap Press
Manufacturer	Belknap Press
NumberOfPages	342
PublicationDate	1982-04-15
Publisher	Belknap Press
ReleaseDate	1982-05-15
Studio	Belknap Press

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