CFP: Penn Ancient Workshop on Plato's Menexenus

The Penn Ancient Philosophy Workshop invites paper proposals for fifteen minute presentations to be given at a workshop devoted to Plato’sMenexenus and held on Saturday January 18th,  2014 at 402 Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania.

While the Menexenus has received scholarly attention, it nevertheless remains a deeply understudied dialogue. This is especially so given the rich and provocative nature of the text. At once ironic and interventionist, theMenexenus teasingly intersects with a broad range of Platonic concerns and other dialogues.

Proposals should address the Menexenus explicitly although they need not do so exclusively. (Intertextual arguments are welcome.) Although the eventual papers should be around 2000 words in length, paper proposalsneed only be 300 words in length.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of suggested topics under which a proposal might fall.

- frame-dialogue, structure of dialogue, meta-textual elements, Socrates-Aspasia problem

- active citizenship, civic ideology, civic institutions, tradition, the role of the polis

- politics and philosophy

- Plato, philosophy and rhetoric, funerary rhetoric in particular

- Symposium vs. Menexenus

- Laws vs. Menexenus

- Statesman vs. Menexenus

- Anthropological myth in the Menexenus

- Menexenus as contemporary political intervention, Plato and recent Greek history

- Contribution of Menexenus to proto-natural law and/or proto-just war theory

- Philosophy, power, empire, imperial resistance

- History, historicity, patterns in history, the politics of historiography

- Plato/Socrates/Aspasia vs. Thucydides/Pericles

- Plato and race

- Socratic-Platonic hierarchy of goods in the Menexenus

Proposals are due by Monday December 2nd, 2013 at 

[email protected]

Acceptance notifications will be sent by Monday December 9th, 2013.

Upon acceptance of proposals, participants must submit their papers electronically to [email protected] by Monday January 6th, 2014.