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BENARDETE, S., The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy. Plato's 'Gorgias' and 'Phaedrus'. University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London, 1991. 205p. Half cloth with pictorial dust wrps. 'For Benardete, the 'Gorgias' is a work concerned with the rhetoric of morality, and one intended to test the efficacy of Gorgianic rhetoric. The 'Phaedrus' represents an inquiry into the possibility of an effective philosophically-grounded rhetoric, which can also properly be called the science of eros. This interpretation, to an extent novel in 1991 though now widely accepted (...), addresses numerous issues central to Platonic studies, including the relationship between the structure of the Gorgias and the image of soul and city in the Republic, and that between the structure of 'Phaedrus' and the concept of eros. (...) Benardete leads the reader step by step through his argument, taking care to ground each point in the text while still assuming familiarity with these texts and others (the index of Platonic passages discussed is 2.5 pages long, and includes 22 works). In what almost seems like a tic, however, Benardete often ends his illuminating paragraphs with an enigmatic statement that often turns on a pun or paradox: e.g., 'Socrates asks for a harmony of inside and outside, though one is to be beautiful and the other is ugly; and he asks for a transvaluation of wealth that makes both 'gold' and 'moderate' into controversial terms (cf. 235e2). Socrates, it seems, asks to be a book; he asked to become Plato's 'Phaedrus' (192-3); 'The 'Phaedrus', however, might not only have a human shape and still be rational. It might look like a monster only because we are too much into ourselves and have not yet stepped out of our own skins. Socrates prays at the end of the 'Phaedrus' to Pan' (...) This is an interesting and lively interpretation of two important and enigmatic Platonic texts. Benardete jumps in with both feet, and his method is concurrent with his interpretations. As should be clear, much is done in these 232 pages. This book is billed as the first time these works are brought together in this way (but see Pohlenz for the 'Phaedrus' as a 'correction' of the view of rhetoric in the 'Gorgias', and Jaeger for the 'Phaedrus' as a new stage in Plato's view of rhetoric from that in the 'Gorgias'). The idea that the 'Gorgias' is the proof of the inadequacy of current rhetoric, which clears the way toward a sketch of what could be true rhetoric in the 'Phaedrus', is now ubiquitous in Platonic scholarship. It would be beneficial for anyone to visit or revisit the work in which this line of interpretation was central.' (RYAN C. FOWLER in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2010.01.21). € 65.00 (Antiquarian) ISBN: 9780226042404