PLATO AS PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL: E.R. DODDS' EDITION OF THE GORGIAS AND ITS'PRIMARY PURPOSE'

Author: Todd R.B.

Source: Polis: The Journal of the Society for Greek Political Thought, Volume 19, Numbers 1-2, 2002 , pp. 45-60(16)

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Abstract:

E.R. Dodds' 1959 edition of Plato's Gorgias is a conventional treatment of this dialogue, aimed at audiences interested in close study of the text. Dodds himself regretted this outcome. He felt he had lost sight of an earlier goal, formulated at a time of political turmoil on the eve of World War II, of using the Gorgias to bring out 'both the resemblance and the difference between Plato's situation and that of the intellectual today'. The present paper attempts to reconstruct that goal, as it survives residually in his edition, surfaces in his The Greeks and the Irrational, and appears in some writings from the 1930s, particularly in unpublished lectures. Dodds did frequently juxtapose ancient and modern conceptions of the intellectual, and in a way that cast Plato in a positive light, as someone politically engaged and self-critical, and acutely sensitive, as Dodds himself was, to the political implications of social psychology.

Keywords: E.R. Dodds; social psychology; social psychology; Plato; biography; intellectuals; fifth-century Athenian democracy; F.C.S. Schiller; William McDougall; Wilfred Trotter; Graham Wallas; Gilbert Murray; pragmatism; Socrates; Pericles

Language: English

Document Type: Research article

Affiliations: 1: University of British Columbia, Dept. of Classical, Near Eastern & Religious Studies, C265-1866 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z1, Canada. Email: bobtodd@interchange.ubc.ca

Publication date: 2002-01-01