Final Project

For my final project I'm writing a series of short dialogues. I've been very interested about using a dialogical medium through which to convey philosophy, and also the different ways within dialogue we can express ideas and develop them; think, for instance, the very different narrative structure of Republic, Theaetetus, Berkley, or even the plays we are currently reading. 

While these could all be considered in some sense, dialogues, they are really quite different in certain literary respects. First person narration of Republic, Socrates as a possibly unreliable narrator, the temporal and character distance we see in Theaetetus, or the straight up style of Berkley. Playwrights even push these boundaries by incorporating other vehicles to convey meaning, such as physical sets, director notes (or the lackthereof) and so on. 

When looking at the minutia of dialogue as a medium, we can see just how flexible and different two works, both ostensibly dialogues, can be. The series I'm working on will employ a wide variety of these narrative structures in an effort to approach ideas and character development differently, although the philosophical content and the characters themselves will appear in every dialogue. 

Plato vs. Hume: Character Depth

As we have noticed thus far, Hume's characters in his dialogues, namely Cleanthes, Philo, and Demea, are all more complex and less like mouthpieces than the characters of Berkley.

One thing I have noticed, however, is despite this depth, certain behaviors of Hume's characters do not connote the same level of profundity as that of Plato's characters. There is plenty of implied meaning behind, for example, Cephalus leaving the room in Book One of Republic, or implied conversion of Glaucon in Book Nine.

Why is this so? It is true that there is certain level of societal satire in Plato that doesn't seem to be present in Hume. We also know a good deal of historical biographical information about many of Plato's interlocutors that gives the characters perhaps a more authentic depth than that of fictional ones, at least in the case of Hume, and certainly Berkley. Moreover, there is also an omniscient tension in Plato's dialogues--almost all of them contain a hero that everyone listening or reading (even in the time of Plato) now knows to have been executed.

Given these added layers, the depth of Plato's interlocutors is much greater than that of Cleanthes, for example, yet is it even fair to compare the two?