Socrates | Plato: Mimetic Irony Explained and the Deficiencies of Writing
Channel: Artem Alexandra
Date: 15/02/2020

Over the past two thousand plus years, the Greek philosopher Plato has been said to have said many things. In this video, I am talking about how possible it is that neither he nor Socrates believed in many of the things that people believe they did. Using concepts and structural analysis by Mitchell Miller, Socrates can be seen as being a nearly companionate teacher as well as an actor for an audience. 

Miller’s term Mimetic Irony has four compositional parts that can be seen in many of Plato’s works; what is talked about here is his Phaedrus. The second half of this video includes some of Socrates’ deficiencies of both speech and writing, and then I also include language as a whole. This could be given as a preface to all of Plato's books as a guide to the reader to take all of what he writes with a grain of salt. 


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One reason why Plato and Socrates may have been so serious is because all of the other philosophers at the time did just that, they took themselves very seriously. And for possibly the same reason Socrates was prosecuted, was he and Plato more famous and remembered than all of the philosophers at the time. I wonder what they would have said had they found out that an annoying street lurker like Socrates had become one of the most renowned philosophers of all time. But as we can tell from Socrates in Plato’s writings, he was not very fond of the sophists either. 

References:
Works from Mitchell Miller used here are from his book “The Philosopher in the Statesmen” and its additional essay called “Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato's Statesman,” which was added years after the original publishing.
Also, the book “Phaedrus” by Plato, the Hackett Publishing edition.
Not “The Philosopher in the Statesmen” but another book my Mitchel Miller that is available to read online is “Plato’s Parmenides (The Conversations of the Soul)” and this also covers his “mimetic irony.”
http://pages.vassar.edu/mitchellmiller/files/2010/10/M-Miller-Platos-Parmenides-The-Conversion-of-the-Soul-Princeton-86-Penn-State-911.pdf.

Other helpful links:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/callicles-thrasymachus/ Plato on Callicles and Thrasymachus
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD6v_eY0IDEGittgHsmd8aQ Ergo Josh’s channel

#plato #art #commentary