Content area
Full Text
RANASINGHE, Nalin. Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato's Gorgias. South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 2009. xviii + 168. Cloth, $27.00- Through speech and deed, Plato's Socrates defines philosophy by engaging in two major quarrels, one with poetry and one with rhetoric, all the while appropriating and fransforming both demonized arts. Recently, academic readers of Plato have become more sophisticated with respect to Socrates' critique and Plato's practice of poetry, but they have remained rather less so with respect to those of rhetoric. This is true of Nalin Ranasinghe's Socrates in the Underworld, as well, an otherwise intelligent, vibrantly written, frequently wise interpretation of the Gorgias. Socrates in the Underworld offers a theological, philosophical, literary, and mythic interpretation of the dialogue's focus on "the instrumental perversion of speech" (p. 4), "the plague of rhetoric on the city" (p. 8), a plague Ranasinghe believes has so sickened contemporary culture that we cannot see that the world is ultimately a feast of truth, not a war of wills, one in which the intellectual and moral integrity of Socratic self-knowledge of soul reveals a beautiful cosmos which gives that soul character, orientation, and satisfaction.
Ranasinghe's hermeneutic is unusual, since, all the while providing a textually detailed and linguistically energetic analysis of the dialogue itself in conversation with other Greek texts - especially other Platonic works and Thucydides (the latter especially iUuminating)...