37 pages • 1 hour read
PlatoPhaedrus
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prelude (227-230)
The Speech of Lysias (231-234)
Interlude—Socrates’s First Speech (234-241)
Interlude—Socrates’s Second Speech (242-245)
The Myth. The Allegory of the Charioteer and His Horses—Love Is the Regrowth of the Wings of the Soul—The Charioteer Allegory Resumed (246-257)
Introduction to the Discussion of Rhetoric—The Myth of the Cicadas (258-259)
The Necessity of Knowledge for a True Art of Rhetoric—The Speeches of Socrates Illustrate a New Philosophical Method (258-269)
A Review of the Devices and Technical Terms of Contemporary Rhetoric—Rhetoric as Philosophy—The Inferiority of the Written to the Spoken Word (269-277)
Recapitulation and Conclusion (277-279)
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaRecapitulation and Conclusion (277-279)Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Summary: “Recapitulation and Conclusion”
Socrates brings the conversation back to an earlier question: how does one define good speechwriting? He reiterates the ingredients of an effective speech: one must be knowledgeable about the subject, one must know whether the subject of his speech is a “whole” or a “part,” and one must know what part of the listener’s soul the speechwriter wants to affect, and plan his words to target it.
Their discussion has shown, Socrates declares, that any writer who claims to have written down an enduring truth should not be believed, as a written opinion cannot be sharpened and refined, nor proven or disproven, by the process of dialogue.
Socrates tells Phaedrus to teach these lessons to Lysias when he returns to the city, while Socrates pledges to teach them to his disciple, Isocrates. Isocrates, he describes, is skilled in the kind of rhetoric that the two of them have praised in the dialogue. Socrates offers a prayer to Pan and the other gods of the riverbank where they have been talking, and the two return to the city together.
Analysis: “Recapitulation and Conclusion”
Socrates’s reasoning in this final section of the dialogue seems to answer a major question that might occur to a reader of Phaedrus: why did Plato commit this dialogue to writing, if Socrates explicitly disparages the effectiveness of writing within it? The answer lies in the unique form that the text takes: that of a conversation among two speakers, able to question, revise, and refine each other’s statements. Even though the conversation portrayed in this dialogue is mostly an invention of Plato’s, by its own admission it is superior to a monologue, since Phaedrus and Socrates are “debating” each other’s ideas, rather than lecturing each other. This form gives Plato a pretext to more fully develop the ideas being discussed.
Isocrates, mentioned in the final portion of the dialogue, is another historical figure. He was slightly older than Plato, and also a disciple of Socrates. It is not entirely clear why Socrates mentions him so late, though it is perhaps to conclude the dialogue on a note more positive than additional criticism of Lysias.
Related Titles
By Plato
