'The Shifting Problems of Mimesis in Plato' [AUTHOR'S MS] in J. Pfefferkorn & A. Spinelli (eds.) Platonic Mimesis Revisited (Academia Verlag, 2021) (original) (raw)

This paper argues that the semantics of mimesis and related terms in Plato’s dialogues are far less stable than orthodox accounts claim. After some preliminary remarks on the intricate implications of the Republic’s Cave allegory in this respect, I focus first on difficulties of interpretation raised by mimesis vocabulary in the Sophist, including the much-discussed dichotomy of eikastikê and phantastikê, whose complications make it a provisional and ultimately discarded attempt to distinguish between reliable and unreliable forms of representation. In the Republic, the semantics of mimesis expand and contract according to the needs of different stages of the argument, as well as shifting between negative and positive evaluations. Part of my analysis concerns the Republic’s series of comparisons between philosophers and painters, comparisons which are at odds with Socrates’ reductive treatment of painting in Book 10. The Sophist calls mimesis a ‘multifarious class’ of entities: no single argument in Plato supplies a definitive way of theorising its conceptual ramifications; we should abandon talk of ‘Plato’s doctrine’ of mimesis.