We'll be reading two dialogues of Plato's, the Symposium and the Phaedrus.
And in some sense, the central topic of both of these dialogues is erotic love.
Now, we call them dialogues, but they are not all
just the back and forth of quick conversation, in a way, say, that play would be,
because it turns out that in both of these dialogues, the great erotic dialogues,
both in the Symposium and in the Phaedrus, the question of erotic life is bound up with questions
about rhetoric, about formal speech-making, about eloquence. So for some reason,
a reason that it's important for you to try to penetrate [is that]in Plato's own mind,
the problems of erotic life are connected somehow to the status of formal language,
of artificial language, of language that's designed to produce persuasive effects.
