The Symposium is one of Plato's most accessible dialogues, an engrossing historical document as well as an entertaining literary masterpiece. By uncovering the structural design of the dialogue, Plato's Dialectic at Play aims at revealing a Plato for whom the dialogical form was not merely ornamentation or philosophical methodology but the essence of philosophical exploration. His dialectic is not only argument; it is also play.

Careful analysis of each layer of the text leads cumulatively to a picture of the dialogue's underlying structure, related to both...

The Symposium is one of Plato's most accessible dialogues, an engrossing historical document as well as an entertaining literary masterpiece. By uncovering the structural design of the dialogue, Plato's Dialectic at Play aims at revealing a Plato for whom the dialogical form was not merely ornamentation or philosophical methodology but the essence of philosophical exploration. His dialectic is not only argument; it is also play.

Careful analysis of each layer of the text leads cumulatively to a picture of the dialogue's underlying structure, related to both...

Osip Mandel'shtam (1891-1938) is considered by many to have been the best Russian poet of his era, and he also wrote a number of critical essays, often considered to be almost impenetrable. Elena Glazov-Corrigan analyses Mandel'shtam's thoughts on poetry and art in the context of the major postmodern literary debates and traces their development throughout his writings. This is the first attempt to describe in a comprehensive way Mandel'shtam's intellectual world and its effect on his evolution as a thinker, specifically, on differences in his attitude towards language.

Of...