Die Bildung der Seele

Plato’s concept of education raises the question of the ­conditions under which the epistemic quest and a change in the attitude of the soul actually correlate. The Platonic motifs of self-care and a good life, soul therapy and shame lead, as this study shows, to a self-reflective movement of knowledge, which has an orienting effect in view of the good and a mediating and ordering effect regarding the soul-body relationship. This work contours the dynamics of learning processes on specific, and figurative, forms of ­representation and on transitions of knowledge. Plato’s anchoring of his educational concept in a philosophical anthropology and his transformation of rhetoric and poetics become manifest through the figure of Eros in the ‘Phaedrus’.