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“Aporia” distinguishes two form of aporia among the early dialogues, epistemic, which occurs in all the texts, and dramatic, which occurs only in some. It is argued that the occurrence of dramatic aporia in select dialogues reflects the theme of the difficulty of realizing philosophy as a rational discursive enterprise within a political community of antiphilosophical attitudes.

This chapter begins with Socrates' account of the nature of eros. The first part of the chapter explores Socrates' account of eros as an intermediate psychological state. The desire for beautiful and good things confronts us with something beautiful and good that our mortal natures lack (an experience of aporia), and yet we awaken a more than human ability to transcend that nature and to strive towards a divine state of possession (euporia). The second part of the chapter explores Socrates' claim that we desire the good and beautiful things we lack in more detail. Socrates singles out wisdom as one of the most beautiful things, and goes on to sketch an account of how eros' nature manifests itself in the pursuit of wisdom. The chapter concludes by arguing that eros' intermediate nature, as manifested in the pursuit of wisdom in particular, is exemplified in the behaviour of Socrates and his alter ego Diotima at this symposium.

This chapter makes several proposals concerning Plato's discussion in Phaedo (95e f.), where causes or explanations are said to be or be based on forms or essences. It states that Plato's argument involves not a contentious notion of a Platonic form but only the notion of essence in the sense of the correct answer to a question of the type ‘What is’, with which we are familiar from earlier in this dialogue, from Plato's earlier dialogues. Second, the chapter suggests, Plato's argument does not rely on a presupposed notion of essence but rather serves to establish the need for such a notion in the context of explanation. Third, it contends, Plato's argument does not rely on the principle ‘like-explains/causes-like’ but rather on the requirement that explanations must be uniform, which Plato spells out independently of that principle. Fourth, the chapter argues, in Plato's account of explanation, which involves basic essences, physical or material components of things can be genuinely part of explanations. Finally, Plato's argument is to be understood as conducted according to a general method of argument and inquiry. This method of argument and inquiry consists in first articulating a particular aporia about explanation in general, and then arguing that a particular account of explanation is both necessary and sufficient to resolve this aporia. The aporia is that, on the one hand, no proposed explanation is genuinely explanatory unless it is uniform; but, on the other hand, no currently proposed explanations, be they everyday or the scientific ones favoured by the natural philosophers, are uniform or begin to indicate how the uniformity-requirement is to be satisfied in the explanations that we propose.

This chapter investigates the so-called method of division, purportedly used in the dialogue Sophist to give the essence of the sophist, i.e., of the sophistic art or expertise. The dialogue's enigma is that it offers not one but seven different definitions, all of them satirical or whimsical, and each purporting to be the account of what sophistry is. The chapter rejects readings on which each of these ‘definitions’, or just the final one — the sophist as a producer of images — is meant seriously as an account of what sophistry is. It argues that the initial assumption — that there is a definable expertise (technē) of sophistry — is one Plato can hardly have shared, given his criteria for what counts as a technē. The chapter concludes that in the Sophist Plato shows both how close sophistry and true philosophy are, and also how they differ — all this without intending the reader to assume that the method of division has revealed any essence of sophistry, since there can be no such thing.

This chapter offers a detailed account of Jacques Derrida's quasi-transcendental thinking. It tries to undo the ties of the interpretative straitjacket that binds Derrida's thinking into an aneconomic freeplay of differences, which sees “deconstruction” as merely the hysterical dismantling of any construction. It also lays a basis for grasping Derrida's deconstructive readings of Sigmund Freud. The discussion begins by criticizing Richard Rorty's early misreadings, which provide excellent material for an attempt to counter the one-sidedness of readings that make of Derrida's philosophical strategy a freeplay relativism. To counter such misreadings, this chapter offers an account of différance in accordance with the “plural logic of the aporia”, aligning “différance as temporization” with the economic aporia and “différance as spacing” with the aneconomic aporia.

There has been persistent controversy about the aporetic dialogs. Are they meant to convey any underlying philosophical position? A strong argument in favor of a negative answer rests on the following premise: if Plato had been trying to present a positive doctrine in his aporetic dialogs, he would have chosen a more straightforward style of writing for his purpose. I argue that this premise is false.

Deciphering the figure of “The Author” in the Talmud, the chapter develops a framework of analysis, where it actively engages the resources – the approaches and theories – of Talmud criticism while broadening the context of inquiry to include conflicting rhetorical and philosophical understandings of what it means to remember and what role thinking may play in memory. The chapter identifies aporias arising from associating the thinking in the Talmud with a person, such as “The Author.”

Language evolved for communication, so it has “built in” features that respond to the givens of human discourse. Part III, beginning with this chapter, covers the language choices that acknowledge the immediacy of discourse, beginning with the partners in communication: the speaker or writer and the hearer or reader. The real roles of source and recipient are also constructed by the language of a text, whether or not they are made explicit. Extreme cases of fashioning the mutual roles of speakers and recipients are modeled in the salutations recommended in medieval letter-writing manuals. Typically, the role construction in a text can be made explicit when the personal pronouns creating rhetorical agents and audiences are used: I, you, we. Each of these choices has special uses and there are corresponding genres of fictional address. When there are no explicit references to the speaker and audience, the text may seem impersonal or objective, but speaker/audience roles are still assigned. The goal of discourse can be to change the relationship, or what Goffman called the footing, between the speaker and the addressee, and the constructed footing can in turn serve what Burke called the persuasive identification between the arguer and the audience. In rhetorical manuals, striking methods of speaker/audience construction were noted. The apostrophe involves specifically calling on or hailing an addressee. Arguers can also partition their audiences, dividing them into subgroups and making the whole group aware of its differences. They can also speak frankly to one subgroup in the presence of another, or even try to purge the audience and purify the remainder. Finally, arguers can ask questions in a variety of ways that turn audiences into cooperative responders.

The first part of the chapter translates and discusses, section by section, Metaphysics Α 10. The second part rveiews in retrospect Aristotle's intentions in Metaphysics Α as a whole, and the progress of his argument through the 10 chapters of the book. It is Aristotle's intention (presented in chapters 1-2) to search for the first principles and causes of being, by reviewing and examining the opinions of his predecessors on this subject. A distinction must be made between Aristotle's report (chapters 3-6) of his predecessors' opinions and his critical discussion (chapters 8-9) of the difficulties (ἀπορίαι) he thinks their views involve; at the end of the book Aristotle reminds us that we need to mull over these difficulties for ourselves: this is the programme set for Book B.

This chapter has two aims. Section I examines the aporia in the Charmides about a certain kind of knowledge (for short, reflexive knowledge): the knowledge of what one knows, that one knows it, and of what one does not know, that one does not know it. The aporia is whether or not, first, it is possible that there should be such a knowledge as this, and, second, if this is possible, the possession of it would be of any benefit. The chapter concentrates on the following questions. First, what is supposed to be the source of this aporia? And, second, what is supposed to be its positive upshot, especially in view of the fact that this dialogue ends not with a solution to it but, on the contrary, with a declaration of defeat in the face of it? Section II examines Plato's account of the idea of the good in the Sun-analogy of the Republic. It begins by considering certain central features of this account in its own right, and argues that the idea of the good is characterised as the joint cause of precisely two kinds of thing: on the one hand, the being, truth, and knowability of the things that are, are true and are knowable; on the other hand, the ability of the rational soul to know these things. Against this background, the chapter goes on to argue that the account of the idea of the good in the Sun analogy provides the resources for an account of reflexive knowledge which holds out promise of solving the Charmides aporia, that is, showing how reflexive knowledge can be both possible and beneficial, and of doing so in a way which addresses both the source and the upshot of this aporia as treated in the Charmides.

This introductory chapter explains the theme of this volume, which is about the interpretation of Plato's dialogue Parmenides. Of all Plato's dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret and scholars of all periods have violently disagreed about its very aims and subject matter. It discusses problems of some methods of interpretation and the issues of elenchus, aporia, and euporia.

No person lives as fully self-sufficient, autonomous beings; everyone is implicated in the lives of others not only at the beginning and end of one's lives, but all throughout. Whether people like it or not, whether they want it or not, people are part of this interconnected global relationship. Since people cannot shed this collective social condition of living in this world, it would seem that considerations of ethics cannot limit themselves to the individually good life. Instead, the conditions of life as social and global issues, as well as their negotiation in politics, economics, and civil society, cannot fall beyond the scope of moral philosophy. Moral philosophy has to reflect on the aporia of having to formulate evaluative criteria to assess social and historical realities, while at the same time such formulations cannot but emerge from very particular social and historical positions themselves.

This chapter addresses the themes of belatedness or afterwardness by contrasting two fictional novels about the Second World War. Fugitive Pieces and Austerlitz were written a generation after the war – 1996 and 2001, respectively — and present a traumatic recollection of childhood memories. These memories can represent the descent to Hell. The chapter also determines that the different ways these novels represent war show how memories of Hell can work to trick or unexpectedly release survivors from unbearable aporia.

This chapter reviews the aporia, particularly when deeper subtleties and layers of textual significance in the Phaedrus come into view. It also considers the issue of writing against writing in terms of the ironic distance opened between Plato as author and Socrates as protagonist, or when other aspects of what is traditionally called ‘the Socratic problem’ bear upon the argument. Eric Havelock's argument makes for the most elegant reading of Plato's arguments against the poets and art generally. Preface to Plato explained the preverbal mystery of the Dionysian in terms of an oral synthesis. Writing is opposed for the same reasons as preliterate poetry, for its repetition, its promotion of hypomnēsis associated with particularity, its unresponsiveness, its silence before questioning, and its changeless words.

This chapter is a meditation on the philosophical wagers and aporia of the historicist opus of Jorge Basadre Grohmann (1903–1980), perhaps Peru's most brilliant historical thinker. Although many gifted historians graced the stage of twentieth-century Peruvian letters, Jorge Basadre was clearly the dominant figure. Today Basadre is universally celebrated as the country's most sagacious and representative historian and he is commonly referred to as “our historian of the Republic.” This chapter primarily discusses the theoretical implications of Basadre's thought, understood as a postcolonial form of “finalist” historicism. Basadre's historicist call for a proper and reflexive history of, in, and for “Peru” actually announces the aporetic end of the “Peruvian history of Peru,” not its beginning. This is so because Basadre's opus reveals that “Peru” is nothing more than a perpetual or quotidian wager on past wagers on the proper name.

This chapter highlights the fact that even radical religious innovation occurs within the frame of preexisting structures of thought, which can on occasion act as “prisons of the longue durée.” It places this notion within ethnographic and historical contexts, returning to the “small-scale” societies. Bali, a “nation” consisting of villages that resemble the small-scale societies of the sample yet have historical connections with Buddhist and Hindu cultures, is predominantly described in the chapter. It begins with an existential puzzle, or aporia, which is expectable in any rebirth eschatology and that is waiting to surface under suitable circumstances. If it is indeed the spirit that initially gets incarnated or reincarnated in the human womb, then what is the role of coitus and seminal ejaculation in conception? This theme raises different ideas from various critiques. According to Plato's idea of a society of men without genitalia, immoral men are punished by being reincarnated as women, beasts, and plants, whereas good males reincarnate in their original form. To resolve this issue it refers to a famous controversy that animated the anthropological imagination in the late 1960s.