A Praise of The Philosophical Written Speech? Ethics and Philosophical Progression in Plato's Symposium

Plato’s choice of the written dialogue as a suitable medium of philosophical communication has received a vast amount of scholarly attention over the past four decades, especially with regard to the nature of its specific contribution to our understanding of his thought. An possible way of looking at Plato’s dialogues is to understand them as forms of dialectical interaction whose protagonists are Plato’s written speeches and his readers. A similar interpretive approach is premised on the assumption that written speeches ought to be considered as alive interlocutors rather than as inanimate documents, and that through them Plato invites the readers to critically engage with issues of high philosophical import. In this chapter I shall adopt this approach as a guiding framework for a reading of one specific dialogue: the Symposium. My most general contention is that the dialogue at stake proves eminently suitable for shedding light on Plato’s concern for the dialectic potentialities of the philosophical written speech.