The passage of love

The Platonic Symposium in Luisa Muraro's reading

Authors

  • Riccardo Fanciullacci Università degli studi di Bergamo

Keywords:

Plato's Symposium, Love, Desire, Contingency, Feminism

Abstract

The article aims to reconstruct Luisa Muraro’s interpretation of Diotima’s teachings as presented in Plato’s Symposium. This interpretation is compared with current debates regarding both the meaning of Diotima’s speech and the question of the historical existence of this figure. Muraro’s reading begins with the issue of Diotima’s historical existence (or non-existence) and then introduces the question of symbolic existence, addressing Plato’s assimilation of a teaching in which traces of ancient knowledge are still discernible. In this article, I clarify the epistemological framework on which Muraro based her search for traces of Diotima’s teachings, going beyond mere philological reconstruction while avoiding gratuitous hermeneutical violence. In the mysticism of the Beguines, Muraro finds the words and concepts to rediscover certain potentialities of Diotima’s teachings (particularly regarding the relationship between love, desire, and contingency) against the Platonic appropriation later developed in Christian Platonism.

Author Biography

Riccardo Fanciullacci, Università degli studi di Bergamo

Riccardo Fanciullacci is Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy at the Department of Literature, Philosophy, and Communication at the University of Bergamo. His research primarily focuses on the Aristotelian ethical tradition and, more broadly, on the comparison between ancient and modern ethics. He has also explored the thought of Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Wolgast, with a particular emphasis on the connections between contemporary ethics and feminist reflections. Another significant area of his research concerns social ontology, with particular attention to the dialectic between technology and history. His academic work includes, among others, the volume L’esperienza etica. Per una filosofia delle cose umane (Orthotes), in which he explores the relationship between ethics and the challenges of the contemporary world.

Published

16-12-2024

How to Cite

Fanciullacci, R. (2024). The passage of love: The Platonic Symposium in Luisa Muraro’s reading. Elephant & Castle, (34), 158–175. Retrieved from https://elephantandcastle.unibg.it/index.php/eac/article/view/546

Issue

No. 34 (2024): Eros and other demons or The Peripeteia of the Symposium: from Plato to the 20th Century

Section

Articoli

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Elephant & Castle

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