Gli interpreti degli interpreti

Abstract

The two authors are the organizers of the annual Socratic Symposium, which has been held in Florence since 2006. The ‘Socratic Symposium’ addresses each year a selected Dialogue of Plato; so far the they discussed the Ion, the Statesman, Timaeus, the Sophist, and the Symposium, by social scientists (sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and philosophers) from UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the US and Canada. The organisation of the Simposia was motivated by their belief in the special relevance of Plato’s ideas for the contemporary, suggested by a range of social scientists and philosophers like Gadamer, Ricoeur, Voegelin, Patocka, and – through his last few years of Collège de France lectures – Michel Foucault. This book on Plato's Ion would form a valuable contribution to other scholarly works, motivated by the perception that politics in the modern world is not simply based on the rational pursuit of objective interests, but that rather – just as in all human societies – it is deeply penetrated by mimetic concerns and forces, visible for instance in the inextricably connected phenomena of political revolutions, totalitarian systems, and media power (see, for example, the role of political marketing and propaganda). The study of such mimetic and emotional aspects to modern democratic politics requires the incorporation of broad, anthropologically based terms and perspectives that move beyond the narrow, rationalistic foundations of political analysis that can be traced back to Kant. This book on Plato's Ion will therefore be situated at the intersection point of social and cultural anthropology, comparative politics, and classical philosophical anthropology.