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Schleiermacher's Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato
Schleiermacher's Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato Author:William Dobson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. LYSIS. A sufficiently unauthenticated legend, inasmuch as Diogenes does not give us the name of its voucher, makes this dialogue one of the earliest, at l... more »east among those written before the death of Socrates. A greater degree of authority however might fairly attach to it than to the similar one respecting the Phagdrus, as this latter rests only upon internal evidence, while the former is grounded upon the tradition of a fact, namely Socrates' exclamation of surprise when he saw himself in the representation given of him by Plato. Such a testimony, however, scarcely deserving as it is of the name, is not here the ground upon which its place is assigned to this dialogue; the connection decides sufficiently in favour of it, even though it were not supported by historical references. For in its subject-matter the Lysis is related to the Phaedrus and the Symposium alone of all the dialogues of Plato, inasmuch as the question as to the nature and the grounds of friendship and love, which constitutes its whole content, is a secondary and subordinate object in point of form in the Phaedrus, while in the Symposium it is, in form, primary and predominant. Clearly, however, it could hardly occur to ony one to place the Lysis after the Symposium, as in the latter the question is not only decided directly and finished to the very last stroke, but also considered in its most extensive and general relations. So that dialectical touches, like those of which the Lysis consists, could scarcely be intended to form an ornamental addition to that discussion, while to work it out as an independent whole subsequently to it, would have been as little consistent with the rules of art as destitute of point, because every one already had before him in that dialogue the solution of every question ...« less