Analysis of "Phaedrus" Essay Example

As translators Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff explain it, “The Phaedrus is a dialogue in the most literal sense. Unlike a number of others of Plato’s works, it is a conversation between two and only two people.” This dialogue by Plato features only two speakers—Socrates and Phaedrus. Socrates is a learned man who has never set foot beyond the city walls; as a scholar, all he has ever needed could be found right in Athens. Phaedrus is a grown man with remarkable admiration for rhetoric and speech-making, but little understanding of Socrates’ philosophical approaches. Their ongoing dialogue—originally about the practicality of love and its subsequent madness—serves as a metaphorical basis for the proper use of rhetoric, which Socrates voraciously argues is not just a means of entertainment, but rather a foundation of views to which one’s life can be lived. His attitude toward both philosophy and rhetoric is that life would be miserable without such deep matters of conversation, and that neither can exist solely without the other. Throughout Phaedrus, the reader is presented with various arguments using both verities, and how they relate to such grandiose topics like love, madness, and the soul. These issues are presented to the reader through a series of dialogues solely between Socrates and Phaedrus. Although assumed by most experts to be a purely fictitious discussion, the beliefs Plato presents in Phaedrus essentially mirror that which his mentor Socrates held in reality; rhetoric must be used with the true knowledge of what one is talking about, but is simultaneously crucial to the endorsement of an argument. I am going to analyze the uses of this rhetoric in Phaedrus and how it affects the transmission of such ideas between the two interlocutors, as well as the intertwining of both rhetoric and concept and how they affect each character’s ethos. Socrates’ use of rhetoric is initially employed through a series of three speeches on love. However, the “love”