The uses of questioning in Plato
Abstract
Reception: October 15, 2015 Accepted: January 7, 2016 This paper aims to explain some methodological uses of interrogation in the philosophical approach of Plato. To assess properly the thought of the Athenian thinker is required as a necessary condition to accept the following postulations: a) you have to understand Plato’s work as an interrelated whole; b) the texts of the Greek thinker are reprocessed over time, implying his own intellectual development; c) the methods are subordinated to ontological and epistemological considerations; d) in the Platonic dialogues there is a spokesman for the author’s thesis. These assumptions lead to establish five different uses of interrogation: 1) the Socratic dialogue, which is refutative; 2) maieutics, understood as a reorientation of interrogation; 3) dialectics is meant as a guide to the search for truth; 4) the hypothetical interrogation, which aims to explore the possibilities of opposing thesis; 5) the division, which aims to the analytical dissociation of concepts. The paper presents and justifies the five ways to use interrogation in Platonic philosophy.References
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