Excelente entrevista de Rebecca Newberger Goldstein a propósito do lançamento do livro
Siga o LINK para a entrevista completa.
Excerto:
A related question about the way Plato did philosophy—specifically about the dialogue form. Would it be fair to say that, in some sense, the form in Plato is the content? Or at least that we have to take the form in which he wrote philosophy seriously.
I think we have to take the [dialogic] form extremely seriously, and also be very sceptical of [Plato’s] doctrines—all of them, including the forms, the body-soul dualism and so on. Plato tells us, in the Seventh Letter, that he writes philosophy with reservations. But he wrote a lot and he chose the dialogue form, so clearly there is something important, philosophically, that he is telling us there. What I’d like to think [he’s saying] is that we can’t do it [philosophy] alone, it really has to happen in the clash of points of view. The things we really have to examine are so constitutive of our thinking that we’re not aware them, and so you need these other points of view. And I like to think that Plato is also telling us the more diverse the points of view the better.
So you’d be sympathetic to someone like Stanley Cavell who says that philosophy ought to aspire to the condition of conversation?
I am, very much. I guess there have been lonely geniuses—Nietzsche was a lonely genius—but even they converse with other philosophers, at least with the texts. When I separate myself from philosophers for too long, I feel the lack, I feel insecure. I need to say something and have one of my abrasive philosophical friends say, “Look, that could mean (a), (b) or (c), and (a) is trivial, (b) is false…” Given that philosophy is argument, you’re not going to test it against empirical reality—you’ve got to test it against other points of view.
