Exploiting Plato s Musical Structure to Resolve Long-Standing Interpretive Issues: The Case of the Unfinished Dialogues

By Dr. Jay Kennedy, University of Manchester

Abstract: Recent research on the narrative structure of Plato's dialogues (Kennedy, 2010; Kennedy, 2011) has argued that symbolic passages at regular intervals mark out the locations of musical notes in a well-known Greek scale. Musicologists have clarified the nature of the scale, and Kennedy(2011) shows in detail how the same scale is used to organize each of the dialogues. The presence of this symbolic structure has consequences for some longstanding disputes in Plato studies. Here, the modern debates over two of Plato's short, `unfinished' dialogues are reviewed. According to Slings(1999), most modern commentators regard the Cleitophon as unfinished because Socrates does not respond to the attacks made on him. Similarly, since the Critias ends in mid-sentence, it has been widely regarded as an incomplete fragment or postscript to the Timaeus (Nesselrath, 2006; Roochnik, 2004). In both cases, however, a minority of interpreters has advanced arguments for regarding the dialogues both as genuine and as finished wholes. It will be shown here that, surprisingly, both the Cleitophon and Critias contain the same, complete musical structure found in the other genuine dialogues. This is strong evidence that these dialogues are complete, and serves as a methodological test-case for bringing Plato's musical structure to bear on long-standing interpretive issues. Kennedy, J. B. 2010, `Plato's Forms, Pythagorean Mathematics, and Stichometry,' Apeiron, 2010, v. 43, no. 1, pp. 1 -32. Kennedy, J. B. 2011, The Musical Structure of Plato's Dialogues, Acumen Publishing Inc., forthcoming this summer. Roochnik, David 2004, `The Riddle of the Cleitophon,' in Ancient Philosophy, 4(1984), 132.145, and in Kremer, Mark, Plato's Cleitophon: On Socrates and the Modern Mind, Lexington Books.

Nesselrath, Heinz.Gunther 2006, Kritias, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. Slings, S. R. 1999,Plato: Cleitophon, Cambridge University Press.