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Chloe Balla

ORGANON, Volume 56, 2024, pp. 139-155

https://doi.org/10.4467/00786500.ORG.24.009.20211

This paper sheds light on Plato’s representation of Zeno in the Phaedrus as a master of antilogic. It examines the evidence in the Phaedrus drawing attention to a certain distribution of labour between the followers of Palamedes, who practice antilogic, on the one hand and those of Nestor and Odysseus, who practice logography, on the other. I suggest that the reason for which Plato prefers to associate Zeno with antilogic rather than Protagoras, who might strike us as an obvious choice, is that the former, unlike the latter, would serve the purposes of his Socratic apologetics, removing from his teacher the reputation that Aristophanes’ Clouds had bequeathed him. This reading ties in with and draws support from Zeno’s remarks concerning the nature of his book in the Parmenides, a dialogue that Plato intends us to understand as a prequel that—again along the lines of an apologetic agenda—claims Socrates’ philosophical pedigree establishing his ties with the Eleatic tradition.

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Biography

Chloe Balla is a professor of ancient philosophy at the University of Crete, Director of the Philosophical Research and Translation Lab, UCRC, and member of the steering committee of the Center of Greek and Chinese Ancient Civilizations (KELKIP). She has published extensively on the Sophists, the Hippocratic Corpus and Plato’s dialogues. She is the author of Platonic Persuasion: From Rhetoric to Statecraft (Athens 1997, in Greek) and The Sophists and Socrates (Athens 2023, co-authored with K. Papamanoli), as well as of a Modern Greek translation of Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians (Athens 2015), and co-editor of Plato’s Academy. Its Workings and Its History (Cambridge 2020), and Deaths of Philosophers in Antiquity (Athens 2010). She has been a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies (Harvard University), the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies (Princeton University) and at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies.

Afilliation

Chloe Balla

University of Crete, Greece

Biography

University of Crete, Greece