James Boyd White, best known for his imaginative readings of law in The Legal Imagination, makes a spate of interesting observations through close readings of the texts as varied as Thucydides’ History and Jane Austen’s Emma in his book, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). In his analysis of Plato’s Gorgias 1 , he draws two conclusions which have a particular interest for me: the first on what differentiates philosophy from history and poetry, and the second on what he calls the ‘Platonic Premise’ 2.
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Continue reading “The Poet, The Historian, and the Philosopher”
- ’The Reconstitution of Language and Self in a Community of Two: Plato’s Gorgias’ in James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 93–113. ↩
- All quotes from Plato are from: Plato, Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997). ↩