Revisiting Plato’s Phaedrus: Rhetoric and Storytelling in Academic Advising
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26209/mj2261452Keywords:
Plato, narrative theory, power of story, interpretation, imaginationAbstract
This article argues that Plato’s Phaedrus offers important insights into narrative approaches to advising. Specifically, the Phaedrus evokes questions around the relative merits of persuasion via rhetoric and inspiration via storytelling. After a brief summary and analysis of the original text, the author invites the reader into an imaginative space in which time is collapsed—the groves of Academe—and proposes a new ending to Plato’s dialogue in which Socrates and his student Phaedrus turn their conversation to various themes around the power of story, the primacy of interpretation, and the meaning of education. In evoking these themes, the author hopes future scholars and practitioners will follow suit into the groves to dialogue with thinkers of the past.
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