Reading & Discussion Series: Plato’s Phaedrus
March 25, 2025 @ 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
What We’ll Explore
The Phaedrus is arguably the most beautiful of Plato’s dialogues. This comes as no surprise, since the subject of the dialogue is Beauty in all its varieties, at every level of the cosmos: from the nymph-haunted grove in which Socrates and Phaedrus have their conversation, to the beauty of human bodies (young Phaedrus was exceptionally handsome!), to the beauty of speech and discourse (both mythic and scientific), to the beauty proper to human souls (their knowledge and virtues), to the intelligible and divine beauty at the summit of all these.
In the course of this wide-ranging inquiry into beauty, many other specific themes and questions arise, notably:
- The issue of madness, insanity, or mania. Is madness — being outside our proper human rationality — always something that makes us in some way “less than fully human” in our behavior, or can some kinds of madness actually be elevating, helping us to live and act in ways that exceed our proper human nature, and share in a divine life?
- Speech and writing. What necessary roles to orality (spoken speech) and memory have? How does the process of writing contribute to, or detract from, our capacities for learning and discourse?
- And of course, love. No treatment of beauty could possibly be complete without considering the activity of love, which draws us toward to what we perceive to be beautiful. How can love for another person, if done well, make an essential contribution to our flourishing in this life and beyond — as Socrates puts it, to the unfolding of the wings of the soul, and her taking flight?
While each session will be self-contained (such that you can attend a stand-alone session and still benefit), participating in as many sessions as possible will allow more time to make and experience larger connections between readings, ideas, and questions explored.
FREE & open to the public. Donations appreciated.
When Every Other Tuesday (3 sessions total) February 25th - March 25th, 2025 6:30pm - 8pm Where Reeder's Alley Conference Center (101 Reeder's Alley) RSVP Sign up here! (Seats limited) Other
We will have more information on the book that we’ll be using in late January. This will provide the group with a shared version of the text, to keep us literally on the same page as we read and discuss together each week, along with some supplementary essays that participants may find helpful in preparing for, and reviewing after, each session.
Cost FREE (Donations Appreciated)
Sessions Reading Structure
While it’s certainly helpful to bear in mind the entire arc of the dialogue, we’ll focus our conversation on roughly one-third of the text (about 20 pages of Plato) in each session. Some of the main themes for each evening’s discussion will include:
WEEK 1 (February 25th)
- The setting, characters, and theme of the dialogue as a whole.
- The first two speeches concerning love, each of which suggest that it might be better to gratify someone who does not love us, rather than someone who does, on account of the madness that love entails. Though Socrates will ultimately go on to recant much of this, these speeches nonetheless point to some things which are true, even if incomplete.
WEEK 2 (March 11th)
- Divinely-inspired love, and the divine madness that places us above the merely rational. As preparation for this, we get Plato’s most definitive and complete argument of the immortality of the soul: a single paragraph that we’ll spend a good deal of our time working to unpack and interpret together.
- We’ll also follow Socrates and Phaedrus in their magnificent vision of our souls circling the heavens, following the Gods in viewing the intelligible forms of Beauty, Justice, and the like.
WEEK 3 (March 25th)
- Now, we’re descending back down from the sweeping vision of the third speech on love. This will include some examination of the beauty of souls, of discourse, and of the grove itself, thus uniting the end back to the beginning. Here too, we find Socrates’ famous (or infamous) critique of writing which, far from being an “all or nothing” type of argument, can offer us as starting point for classifying the purposes and appropriate methods of different types of discourse.
Series Facilitator
David Nowakowski is a philosopher and educator in the Helena area whose professional work is dedicated to helping people of all ages and backgrounds access, understand, and apply the traditions of ancient philosophy to their own lives. David began studying ancient philosophies and classical languages in 2001, and has continued ever since. A scholar of the philosophical traditions of the ancient Mediterranean (Greece, Rome, and North Africa) and of the Indian subcontinent, reading Sanskrit, Latin, and classical Greek, he earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 2014. His work has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals, including Philosophy East & West, Asian Philosophy, and the Journal of Indian Philosophy, as well as in presentations to academic audiences at Harvard, Columbia University, the University of Toronto, Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and elsewhere.
After half a decade teaching at liberal arts colleges in the northeast, David chose to leave the academy in order to focus his energies on the transformative value of these ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions in his own life and practice, and on building new systems of education and community learning that will make this rich heritage alive and available to others.
A hermit by nature and by committed choice, he balances contemplative solitude with his active work in teaching, counseling, and the healing arts. David can be reached at [email protected] or via his personal website.
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