Plato's Educational Paradigm Shift: From Authority to Dialectic

DOI

10.2991/icelaic-16.2017.3How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Dialectic; Homer; Plato; Poetry; Republic; Rhetoric

Abstract

Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were the educational textbooks of the Greeks which Plato sought to replace with his own work, the Republic. It was not merely that Plato wanted to replace older work with his own, rather his aim was to replace the mode of education from one of memorizing and quoting an ancient authority with the personal engagement using the dialectical method. At same time, he also sought to replace the rhetoric of seductively beautiful poetry which canonized falsehoods about the nature of the world with the sober and open-ended inquiry of questions and answers (leading to ever more questions) in prose. Thus Plato's attack on Homer was nothing less than a cultural paradigm shift from the heroic age of warfare to what Plato hoped would be an age founded upon the order of reason.

Copyright

© 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jeffrey Dirk Wilson
PY  - 2016/12
DA  - 2016/12
TI  - Plato's Educational Paradigm Shift: From Authority to Dialectic
BT  - Proceedings of the 2016 3rd International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2016)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 8
EP  - 11
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icelaic-16.2017.3
DO  - 10.2991/icelaic-16.2017.3
ID  - Wilson2016/12
ER  -