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Preexistence is associated with both Pythagoras and Orpheus, however. Plato is the most important classical source for ideas about pre-existence, writing about it in Phaedo, Meno, Phaedrus, Republic, and Timaeus. Symposium also presents a version of soul-mate love as have premortal bases. Preexistence supports Plato's particular epistemology as well as a version of theodicy and his understanding of erotic desire. Plato also links preexistence to theosis, a connection that will contribute to the paradigms eventual demise.

The creation of a white-collar class in America brought with it changes in demographic patterns, particularly where romance was concerned. No longer largely economic, marriage became increasingly seen as an emotional and romantic fulfillment of human needs. Spiritualists agreed that love was of utmost importance but recognized that many unhappy marriages resulted in women and children caught in impossible situations. Spiritualists advocated an eternal love between soul mates but fought for reform of marriage and divorce law at the same time. True love was understood using Aristophanes’ portrayal of the primal androgynous unit from Plato’s Symposium—love gathered the halves of bodies as well as souls. At the fringes of the movement were sex radicals and free-love adherents like Victoria Woodhull who called for dramatic legal reform in both marriage and eugenics.

This chapter argues that, in the Symposium, Plato not only recalls Hesiodic passages and motifs at important moments in the dialogue, but founds his portrayal of Socrates on Hesiod's Pandora. The claim is striking, even paradoxical if one thinks of Pandora as the bringer of evils. But defined, like Socrates, by the rift between interior and exterior, essence and appearance, Pandora is, like Socrates, a marvel to behold — and (also like him) a challenge to the intellect, the obvious prompt to philosophical inquiry.

Plato’s character Socrates is clearly a sophisticated logician. Why then does he fall, at times, into the most elementary fallacies? It is, this chapter proposes, because the end goal for Plato is not the mere acquisition of superior understanding but instead a well-lived life, a life lived in harmony with oneself. For such an end, accurate opinions are necessary but not sufficient: what we crucially need is a method, a procedure for ridding ourselves of those opinions that are false. Now learning a method is a very different business from learning a set of ideas. It requires not just study but practice, and practice is precisely what Plato’s dialogues, thanks to the layer of irony between author and protagonist, make possible. If we have a predisposition for detecting and are interested in resolving conflicts within a set of beliefs—if, that is, we instinctively posit logical consistency as a desideratum in life—then we stand to learn, when we read the dialogues, not only what to think but also, and far more important, how to think.

I suggest that erotic love is (or can be) a virtue. I contest both the cynicism and the vacuousness in much of the love literature. I argue that love is a historical emotion, involving a great deal of historical and cultural variation. And I give an analysis of what love is as shared identity. On the way, I also talk about sex and Plato's Symposium.

The symposium “Choices on Our Conscience” was more than just an inaugural event for the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and Bioethics. It was said to be “a symposium on human rights, retardation, and research.” This chapter provides a detailed account of the said symposium.

Before Plato there are ample cases in which Greek poets, philosophers, and politicians recognize the possibility that individual and social good can conflict. Nor does Plato think that a full understanding of the notion of one's good must demonstrate that it cannot conflict with standards of justice. On the contrary, Plato holds that such conflicts can occur even in the case of the rulers of his ideal city‐state. This idea is not contradicted by evidence of other works, such as the Meno, the Symposium, and the Philebus. Nevertheless, although Plato's view admits what is normally thought to be a characteristically Kantian conflict of ethical standards with one's good, it still possesses some distinctly eudaimonistic elements that are at variance with the Kantian view.

The most virtuous life need not be the life of calm tranquility, peace of mind, and merely intellectual contemplation. There is also a good life to be had that is defined by emotions, by impassioned engagements and quests, by embracing affections, by constant striving, even frenzy, typified by insatiability and impossible passions. So, too, the virtues are not all about moderation. Not all passions are irrational, out of control, or “violent.” A life without passion would be a life barely worth living.

That Aristotle borrowed the standard form for lyric hymns is shown through an analysis of Ariphron’s song in praise of Health, which is classified as a kind of hymn, a “paean,” in our sources. The question of the genre of Aristotle’s song remains open, however, because Pindar’s Olympian 14 shows that hymnic form could be incorporated into other genres. This Pindaric poem is also read to suggest that parts of poems could be reperformed as new kinds of song in new contexts, especially at symposia. The range of hymnic forms in different musical and metrical modes is shown through a reading of hexameter and elegiac hymns by “Homer,” Aristotle, and “Socrates.”

This chapter centres on Xenophon's Symposium and the significance of dance within the dialogue. Beginning with a discussion of dancing, pleasure, and paideia in Plato's Laws, it suggests that Xenophon's text is concerned with the same philosophical issues surrounding mousike, mimesis, pleasure, and the good. The dialogue stages a competition between the pleasure of dance and the pleasure of philosophical discourse. But Socrates himself is figured as a dancer, an image which is explored within the context of two interconnected sympotic themes, paideia, and eros. The contest proves to be less straight-forward than might first appear, for the lascivious dance with which the dialogue ends threatens to undermine Socrates' earlier insistence on the superiority of ouranian pederastic eros.

“Eumaeus' Redux,” a second examination of the “Eumaeus” chapter of Ulysses produced a different, though not incompatible, reading from the one in The Odyssey of Style. Presented as a plenary talk at the International James Joyce Symposium in Monaco in 1990, this chapter takes as its starting point the “received ideas” in “Eumaeus” discussed in The Odyssey of Style, but discovers in this second look at the language of the chapter a tissue of economic metaphors that encode class consciousness, colonial exploitation, and violence. Tracing the perambulations of “Mr Bloom” and Stephen in the vicinity of the cabman's shelter, the narrative reveals both Bloom's sympathy with the down-and-out denizens of the area and his attempt to bolster his own respectability.

“Twenty Pockets,” delivered at the International James Joyce Symposium in Rome in 1998, “picks” Bloom's pockets: it analyzes the way the male suit helps Bloom consolidate his bourgeois masculine image of self-possession and restraint, allowing him to compartmentalize his desires in the various pockets of his attire. Again in ritualized performances, Bloom hoards, exchanges, fondles and protects objects of desire in the repositories of privacy provided by the pockets of his suit as he circulates through the streets of Dublin. Pockets are temporary havens for the characters' private property as they navigate their way through the city streets. In a way, all the small objects that Bloom carries in his pockets are amulets, for pockets in Ulysses are reservoirs of possessions and self-possession, the daily arsenals with which the male characters leave their houses, armed for circulation in society.

What healthy vegetables and rich meatstuffs are to Persius’ metaphorical division of poetry into good and bad, friendship and sexuality are to his discussion of pedagogy as itself morally charged for better or worse. In Satire 4, Persius takes on and reformulates Plato’s Alcibiades I, in which Socrates’ seductive ways are shown as reforming Alcibiades and making him ready to study philosophy. This satire challenges that happy picture by bringing in the Symposium to show up Alcibiades as a pedagogic failure, and both sexuality and dialectic are criticized as ineffective elements in the Platonic depiction of teaching philosophy. Instead, Persius praises the inwardly turned gaze of the Stoic student and, in Satire 5, demonstrates through the figure of Cornutus the kind of teacher that should replace Socrates as an ideal.

Philosophy is the love of wisdom. Love is an incompletion. The Symposium is structured as a series of stories or speeches about love and philosophy. It determines a connection between love and philosophy, indicating that both are an unending movement between ignorance and knowledge, lack and fulfilment. The roles of lover and beloved become equivocally interlaced. Jacques Derrida reflects on the operation of a postal principle that he equates with the Freudian conception of the pleasure principle. Love protests a closure or completion that would end the mediations and oscillations of love. Bringing together philosophies and stories of love, and reading these re-presentations as unworking disseminations and deconstructions show the entwining of love, philosophy and cultural creations. All three unravel finality, stasis, closure and totality, exposing the sharing and the openness or exposure that creates connection between self and the other in sociality.