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Preface to Plato

Front Cover
5 Reviews
Harvard University Press, 1963 - Literary Criticism - 328 pages

Plato's frontal attack on poetry has always been a problem for sympathetic students, who have often minimized or avoided it. Beginning with the premise that the attack must be taken seriously, Mr. Havelock shows that Plato's hostility is explained by the continued domination of the poetic tradition in contemporary Greek thought.

The reason for the dominance of this tradition was technological. In a nonliterate culture, stored experience necessary to cultural stability had to be preserved as poetry in order to be memorized. Plato attacks poets, particularly Homer, as the sole source of Greek moral and technical instruction--Mr. Havelock shows how the Illiad acted as an oral encyclopedia. Under the label of mimesis, Plato condemns the poetic process of emotional identification and the necessity of presenting content as a series of specific images in a continued narrative.

The second part of the book discusses the Platonic Forms as an aspect of an increasingly rational culture. Literate Greece demanded, instead of poetic discourse, a vocabulary and a sentence structure both abstract and explicit in which experience could be described normatively and analytically: in short a language of ethics and science.

  

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Review: Preface to Plato

User Review  - Egor Sofronov - Goodreads

If an enlightening enterprise in archaealogy of knowledge into the Platonic Revolution, then a bit tautological one. Read full review

Review: Preface to Plato

User Review  - Tim - Goodreads

For those billions of you loosing sleep each night trying to figure out why Plato was so hostile to poetry in the Republic, this book will give you sweet dreamless sleep, whiter teeth, and shrink your waistline while you feast on chocolate and pork rinds. And it might even be half true! Read full review

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Contents

Plato on Poetry
3
Mimesis
20
Poetry as Preserved Communication
36
The Homeric Encyclopedia
61
Epic as Record versus Epic as Narrative
87
Hesiod on Poetry
97
The Oral Sources of the Hellenic Intelligence
115
The Homeric State of Mind
134
The Psychology of the Poetic Performance
145
The Content and Quality of the Poetised Statement
165
Psyche or the Separation of the Knower from the Known
197
The Recognition of the Known as Object
215
Poetry as Opinion
234
The Origin of the Theory of Forms
254
The Supreme Music is Philosophy
276
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Preface to Plato
Preface to Plato
Eric A. HAVELOCK
Limited preview - 2009
Preface to Plato
Preface to Plato
Eric Alfred Havelock
Snippet view - 1963
Preface to Plato
Preface to Plato
Eric Alfred Havelock
Snippet view - 1963

Common terms and phrases

abstracted objects Achilles action Adam Parry Adeimantus Agamemnon alphabet apparatus argued artist audience become behaviour Book Five Calchas catalogue character Chryseis conception concrete condition defined Democritus describe discourse doctrine educational effect epic example experience fact formulas function Glaucon Greece Greek mind habit Hence Heraclitus Hesiod Homer human identify idiom Iliad imitation intellectual invention kind language linguistic living memory mean mental metrical mimesis minstrel modern moral Muses Mycenaean narrative nomoi oral culture organised Parmenides pattern performance philosopher phronesis physical Plato poem poet poet's poetic poetry political possible pre-Platonic pre-Socratics precisely preserved communication problem psyche psychological recital repeated represented Republic rhythm rhythmic sense situation social society Socrates sophisticated speak specific speech statement story style suggest symbolise syntax technique Theog Theogony Theory of Forms things thought tion tradition tribal encyclopedia usage verbal vocabulary word Zeus

References to this book

From other books

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The logic of practice
Pierre Bourdieu
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Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses
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James Gee
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From Google Scholar

Orality AND Literacy
Walter Ong - Communication Theory
Oral and Literate Strategies in Spoken and Written Narratives
Deborah Tannen - 1982 - Language
Literacy and Literacies
James Collins - 1995 - Annual Review of Anthropology
Orality and Literacy: From The Savage Mind to Ways With Words
JAMES PAUL GEE - VOLUMES MENU
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References from web pages

Cogwheels: Notes on 'Preface to Plato'
Notes on 'Preface to Plato'. Preface to Plato, Eric A. Havelock, 1982 On the transition from orality to literacy in ancient Greece, ca. 5th century BC. ...
cogwheels.blogspot.com/ 2004/ 04/ notes-on-preface-to-plato.html

PREFACE TO PLATO - GARY.C. MOORE - Athenaeum Library of Philosophy
Have you looked at PREFACE TO PLATO by Eric A. Havelock? .... The exposition here will rely extensively on E. Havelock’s PREFACE TO PLATO [Cambridge, Mass., ...
evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ gary_prefacetoplato.htm

JSTOR: Preface to Plato
Preface to Plato. Friedrich Solmsen. The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 87, No. ... Preface to Plato. Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. ...
links.jstor.org/ sici?sici=0002-9475(196601)87%3A1%3C99%3APTP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W

mcluhan Program - Toronto School of Communications - Havelock ...
See also his Preface To Plato (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard ... [2] Havelock, Preface to Plato, pp. vii-xii. Here, he refers to Harold ...
www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/ tsc_havelock_orality_literacy.htm

Eric A. Havelock - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Preface to Plato had a profound impact almost immediately after ... [25] Preface to Plato has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. ...
en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Eric_A._Havelock

Eric A. Havelock: Information and Much More from Answers.com
Preface to Plato had a profound impact almost immediately after ... [25] Preface to Plato has remained continuously in print since its initial publication. ...
www.answers.com/ topic/ eric-a-havelock

Literary Encyclopedia: Eric Alfred Havelock
In 1963 Havelock asserted an astonishing thesis in his Preface to Plato, ... One of Havelock’s greatest challenges, then, in Preface to Plato is to decipher ...
www.litencyc.com/ php/ speople.php?rec=true& UID=12025

Tom Clark and the Collected Prose 2
I had not read Preface to Plato at the time, but I knew enough to make me worried ... He appreciated Preface to Plato because it showed in exact detail what ...
charlesolson.ca/ files/ ClarkProse2.htm

Introductions to the Work of Walter J. Ong, sj(Featured Review ...
Farrell places Ong's work on Ramus in the context of Havelock's Preface to Plato (1963) and Frances Yates' The Art of Memory (1966), suggesting that it may ...
www.encyclopedia.com/ doc/ 1G1-130975460.html

Plato - Topic :
You may want to read Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato, Harvard up, 1963. As for the Republic,the Cornford ed. (Oxford up) is pretty good. ...
answerpool.com/ eve/ forums/ a/ tpc/ f/ 436601891/ m/ 7731050953

Bibliographic information

QR code for Preface to Plato
TitlePreface to Plato
Volume 1 of A History of the Greek mind, v. 1
Books on demand
AuthorEric A. HAVELOCK
Editionillustrated, reprint
PublisherHarvard University Press, 1963
ISBN0674699068, 9780674699069
Length328 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Literary Criticism / Ancient & Classical
Literary Criticism / General
Literary Criticism / Poetry
Philosophy / History & Surveys / Ancient & Classical
  
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