Jill Gordon, “Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death” (Cambridge UP, 2012)
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What is the main focus of Jill Gordon’s book on Plato’s erotic world?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, the podcast channel with the New Books Network that features interviews with philosophers about their recently published books. I'm Carrie Figdor of the University of Iowa and I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise of Vanderbilt. Today's interview is with Jill Gordon, Charles A. Dana Professor of Philosophy at Colby College. Her new book is Plato's Erotic World, which is just out from Cambridge University Press. It's traditional in Plato's scholarship to divide his dialogues in various ways and One division is a temporal one in into what are considered early, middle, and late dialogues. Another is by content, but There are the so called erotic dialogues, which include such dialogues as Symposium, Phaedrus, and Alcibiades.
Where themes of love and friendship are explicitly treated, and then there's the rest of them, which deal with such non erotic themes as language and knowledge and ontology. But in her new book, Professor Gordon argues that this second division deeply misinterprets the role of Eros throughout the Platonic corpus, and that even what are taken to be non erotic dialogues such as Theetetus, Parmenides, and Phaedo are deeply erotic, and that the theme of Eros unifies the corpus rather than divides it. For example, the Socratic dialectic or Elenchus is a give and take that is erotic in nature, and doing philosophy itself is an erotic endeavor akin to naked exercise in the gymnasium. Her argument begins with a close reading of Timaeus, Plato's creation method.
And the role of Eros in the immortal human soul, and it comes full circle with a reading of the Phaedo, in which Socrates' growing rigidity as the hemlock takes hold is also an erotic pun. Let's turn to the interview. Hi, Jill. Hi
Carrie.
Hi, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Thank you, and thanks so much for the opportunity to talk about my work.
Yeah, this is this is great. Um Plato's uh erotic world. Um you give a defense of the importance of Eros in Plato's dramatic world, um, and you're trying to undermine traditional interpretations of of key dialogues, um, to show them as deeply erotic. Um and that's a pretty interesting um approach uh because you know, Plato of course is is one of the philosophers who is who is so widely known and and widely discussed and and to give a new interpretation like this is is really pretty exciting.
Well, thank you. Yeah, it's one of those projects um where You're sort of working on it thinking, Wow, this is really eccentric. Uh and then, you know, you kind of have two choices to think that maybe you might move the center to some other place. Um Or you know, really just convince people to think about these dialogues differently.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main focus of Jill Gordon’s book on Plato’s erotic world?
0:00–7:49
2
How does Gordon redefine the traditional division between erotic and non‑erotic Platonic dialogues?
7:49–16:43
3
What is Gordon’s preliminary account of Eros and its role in the human soul?
16:43–37:42
4
How does the close reading of the *Timaeus* reveal Eros as a cosmic force?
37:42–45:22
5
What does Gordon mean by “Plato’s dramatic world” and how does it unify the dialogues?
45:22–54:05
6
Why does Gordon interpret the *Parmenides* as an erotic dialogue?
54:05–1:03:07
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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