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Summary Of Plato's Phaedrus

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In many of Plato’s works, rhetoric is condemned due to its ability to sway the audience based on emotion and falsities. In the Phaedrus, Socrates writes a critique of writing to show that the way writing was being used made it too easy for people to claim false knowledge and practice rhetoric instead of dialectic. Socrates isn’t critiquing the art of writing itself, only the way that writing could be used to persuade the writer that he had true understanding of the things that he was writing. However, although Socrates made a critique of writing for the sake of knowing rather than understanding, the same problems that he had with writing can also be applied to oration.
Plato’s critique of writing relies on the reader’s knowledge of the difference between rhetoric, the art of persuasion, and dialectic, the art of seeking the truth. In order to make a worthy speech, the speaker must use dialectic, and speak intending on guiding his audience towards the truth. Although all speeches must use rhetoric …show more content…

Because writing gives people the illusion that they understand things, they accept what is written down as the truth without thinking seriously about it. They believe that they have a grasp on the things which they are writing, when in reality they may not understand it at all. Rather than trying to grasp the meaning of the thing which they are writing and commit it to memory, they can easily take note and then forget about it. They can easily make arguments based upon the things that they have written without knowing what they are really arguing about. Although they might know the words that are written, they don’t understand the meaning behind the words. However because they believe that they know what they are talking about and truly understand what they are saying, it may be easy for them to convince people of the same things that they believe regardless of the

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