Presenting a range of arguments against meat-eating, many strikingly familiar, Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Ensouled Beings (Greek Περὶ ἀποχῆς ἐμψύχων, Latin De abstinentia ab esu animalium) offers a sweeping view of the ancient debate concerning animals and their treatment. At the same time, because of its advocacy of an asceticism informed by its author’s Neoplatonism, Abstinence is often taken to be concerned primarily with the health of the human soul. By approaching Abstinence as a work of moral suasion and a work of literature, whose intra- and intertextual resonances yield something more than a collection of propositions or an invitation to Quellenforschung, I aim to push beyond interpretations that bracket the arguments regarding animals as merely dialectical; cast the text’s other-directed principle of justice as wholly subordinated to a self-directed principle of purity; or accept as decisive Porphyry’s exclusion of craftsmen, athletes, soldiers, sailors, and orators from his call to vegetarianism. In Porphyry’s treatise, a discourse of “more and less” with respect to animal reason is consistent with the “more and less” of abstinence itself among the work’s priestly and philosophical exempla and the results, “more and less” successful, of assimilating oneself to god “as much as possible.” Whether fully or partly abstinent, Porphyry’s models, part of a pervasive discourse of imitation and possibility, point to a life characterized by radical self-control, free of the bad mixture, impurity, and harmfulness that meat-eating entails. Reading the text as an integral whole rather than as a collection of sources deployed without commitment, I seek to foreground its suggestions of other-directedness and inclusiveness, not just in its extensive treatment of justice toward animals but also in its abiding concern for purity and piety.

This dissertation establishes that the Platonic dialogues Theaetetus, Sophist and Statesman comprise a tightly woven trilogy which is unified both thematically and philosophically. Its focuses on the last dialogue in this list, relatively neglected by commentators, the Statesman. Despite the fact that Plato seems to take pains to alert us to the thematic unity of the Theaetetus, Sophist and Statesman, not only has the unity of the dialogues not been adequately appreciated, but the Statesman has usually been treated as a mere curious appendage: a dialogue of interest primarily if not solely for insight into Plato’s late political philosophy. This thesis proposes that the Statesman is, rather, the culmination of this very important trilogy of dialogues, and that one can have a proper understanding of the dialogues and the philosophical issues with which they are concerned only if one understands the relation of the Statesman to the prior two dialogues. In order to establish the unity of the three dialogues and the central importance of the Statesman for the epistemology developed in them, this dissertation seeks to show that the epistemological doctrines initiated but left in a state of incompletion in the initial dialogue, the Theaetetus, find partial completion in the next dialogue, the Sophist, but are fully worked out only in the Statesman. The epistemology developed in the trilogy is an interrelational epistemology, as other scholars have maintained. This dissertation argues for a modified version of the interrelational model on which axiological and hierarchical relations play a role of maximum importance. By brining this interrelational epistemology to fruition in the political context of the Statesman, where it is used to provide an account of human being and the polis, Plato discloses the ineluctably political nature of knowledge and philosophy.

This dissertation analyzes why Heliodorus pays so much attention to foreign languages in the Aethiopica and how his description of these linguistic phenomena colors the work. It demonstrates that Heliodorus is very careful to attribute linguistic abilities to characters in a sensible way that is in line with real-world expectations. Characters never speak a mutual language merely because it would be convenient for the author if they could. Language also helps aid the author's characterization. Heliodorus draws upon long-standing cultural attitudes towards multilingual individuals to make his religious priests more authoritative and trustworthy and his conniving merchants even less so. Female characters with multiple languages are seen as sexually suspect, while Charikleia, the novel's heroine, preserves both her chastity and her status as a monolingual Greek speaker. Nonverbal communication is as problematic to interpret as the dreams and oracles in the novel, but spoken language doesn't present any hermeneutic problems; speech is either understood or not understood, but never misunderstood. The final book of the novel demonstrates both the limits of speech and the power of the human voice to transcend spoken language.

Heliodorus' treatment of language in the novel is, as other scholars have suggested, both based on a desire for realism and an emphasis on interpretive processes, but this is not the whole story. The attribution of specific linguistic abilities to specific characters also communicates to the reader a wealth of information about those characters. Because this information is derived from the reader's expectations about language in the real world, an analysis of linguistic phenomena in the novel opens up two kinds of information. Our understanding of the novel will be better if we take into account the author's treatment of language, and the novel itself may present tantalizing glimpses into the attitudes toward language present in the culture of the author and the novel's first readers.

This dissertation treats Socrates’ argumentative strategies in Plato’s Protagoras, Gorgias, and Meno. These strategies will be compared to those found in Aristotle’s logical works, especially his Analytics, Topics, and Sophistical Refutations. In these texts, Aristotle describes the competitive debates popular among certain Greek intellectuals. These bouts featured a questioner who offered various propositions to an answerer. The questioner tried to force the answerer into a contradiction based on affirmed propositions, and the answerer tried to evade contradiction by caution in making affirmations. Few scholars have argued that Plato’s dialogues are representatives of these verbal jousts, but such a claim resolves traditional difficulties, such as (1) what Socrates’ method was (if he had one), or (2) why he made ‘bad’ arguments, or (3) what he hoped to achieve by refuting an opponent.

By using the criteria provided in Aristotle’s logical works, we can offer new answers to these traditional questions. (1) Aristotle would identify the method of any competive debater, Socrates included, as the crafting of premises plausible enough to be accepted by an opponent, which lead the opponent to a patent contradiction. (2) If Socrates makes bad or even fallacious arguments, it is only because he thinks that the premises are sufficiently plausible to be accepted by his opponent. (3) Socrates’ goal within the game of question-and-answer is victory, but Socrates has the broader goal of exposing the ignorance of self-proclaimed experts like Protagoras, Polus, and Meno. The refutations of these experts are an invitation for them to abandon their pretensions, which Socrates sees as roadblocks to philosophical inquiry.

The introduction of the dissertation outlines my synthesis of Aristotle’s dialectical theory, which sets the interpretative framework for the rest of the dissertation. In Chapter One, I use this hermeneutic to read the Protagoras. I argue that Socrates’ conversation with Hippocrates is a successful example of what Aristotle would call examinational (peirastic) dialectic, and that his conversation with Protagoras is a failed example. Chapter Two treats Socrates’ controversial refutation of Polus. Socrates fights the young eristic with eristical arguments of his own—a move countenanced in Aristotle’s Topics. The last chapter treats the Meno. I argue, against one common opinion, that anamnesis and the hypothetical method do not make the dialogue “transitional”, and do not make Socrates more confident in the truth of his conclusions. Rather, the dialogue shares argumention similar to that observed in the previous two chapters.

The orthodox view is that Plato is hostile toward poetry and that his antagonism is at bottom motivated by his metaphysical commitment to the Forms. I argue instead that Plato is a poetry revisionist, who compellingly critiques popular Greek poetry. Whereas popular Greek poetry fosters illusions of virtue and value, reformed poetry, which includes Plato's own dramatic dialogues, produces accurate images of virtue and value. I argue, further, that Plato's theory of audience psychology applies to moviegoers and that this has implications for the impact of film on adults and philosophical theories of audience response more generally.