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Mason Marshall, Reading Plato’s Dialogues to Enhance Learning and Inquiry: Exploring Socrates’ Use of Protreptic for Student Engagement, Routledge, New York—London, 2021, ix + 223 p., ISBN 9780367636326 [hbk], £ 96

Mason Marshall, Reading Plato’s Dialogues to Enhance Learning and Inquiry: Exploring Socrates’... This is not a book primarily about Plato. Nor is it a book about how to read Plato. It is a book about how to engage in protreptic arguments by reading Plato’s dialogues. Its aim is not to understand Plato, but to understand protreptic. Protreptic is narrowly taken as any argument that leads to the specific Socratic activity of self-examination. This is perfectly legitimate, but readers interested in ancient philosophical protreptic more broadly will look in vain for discussions about how to engage a recipient in philosophical thinking other than the self-reflective kind. As the subtitle suggests, the book is concerned not just with any recipient of a protreptic argument, but with students and their engagement. This theme, however, lingers only in the background throughout the investigation.Marshall offers two strategies for reading passages in which Socrates aims to bring his interlocutor to self-examination. Whereas such passages have often been interpreted by use of dialectic and refutation, Marshall widens the scope and proposes to read them by use of a certain type of thought experiment (his top-down strategy) or “what-if-Socrates-had-done-this-instead-of-that” (his bottom-up strategy). The top-down strategy encourages the reader to ask what other argumentative strategies Socrates could have used in http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Rhizomata de Gruyter

Mason Marshall, Reading Plato’s Dialogues to Enhance Learning and Inquiry: Exploring Socrates’ Use of Protreptic for Student Engagement, Routledge, New York—London, 2021, ix + 223 p., ISBN 9780367636326 [hbk], £ 96

Fink, Jakob Leth
Rhizomata , Volume 10 (1): 3 – Aug 1, 2022
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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
ISSN
2196-5110
eISSN
2196-5110
DOI
10.1515/rhiz-2022-0007
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Abstract

This is not a book primarily about Plato. Nor is it a book about how to read Plato. It is a book about how to engage in protreptic arguments by reading Plato’s dialogues. Its aim is not to understand Plato, but to understand protreptic. Protreptic is narrowly taken as any argument that leads to the specific Socratic activity of self-examination. This is perfectly legitimate, but readers interested in ancient philosophical protreptic more broadly will look in vain for discussions about how to engage a recipient in philosophical thinking other than the self-reflective kind. As the subtitle suggests, the book is concerned not just with any recipient of a protreptic argument, but with students and their engagement. This theme, however, lingers only in the background throughout the investigation.Marshall offers two strategies for reading passages in which Socrates aims to bring his interlocutor to self-examination. Whereas such passages have often been interpreted by use of dialectic and refutation, Marshall widens the scope and proposes to read them by use of a certain type of thought experiment (his top-down strategy) or “what-if-Socrates-had-done-this-instead-of-that” (his bottom-up strategy). The top-down strategy encourages the reader to ask what other argumentative strategies Socrates could have used in

Journal

Rhizomata – de Gruyter

Published: Aug 1, 2022

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