PLATO’S TEXTS AND HERMENEUTICS AS A PHILOSOPHICAL PROCEDURE
Annotation
What are Plato’s dialogues if not memoirs about events that happened within the memory
of the “past generation”? Plato filled the text with real characters, neighbors, politicians,
entrepreneurs, poets, ordinary people, traitors. In them there is no epic drama, sublime,
panegyric — except for Socrates himself and literally a few other characters. Socrates is the
point of assembly of these events, disparate in time, participants, themes. The result is a kind
of Athenian analogue of the late Soviet dialectic in the kitchen. What is the reason for the
success of this literary project, forcing us to constantly return to its reinterpretation and new
forms of understanding? Let us try to explain this through the concept and phenomenon of
common sense, its functions in the formation of goal-setting and human activity, as well as
the nature of the gaps in it, which force us to turn to hermeneutic procedures. Let us try to
explain why Plato’s Socrates is the ideal instrument, tearing apart the fabric of the “common
sense” in such a way that this gap cannot be “mend” to this day
Keywords
Plato, philosophical dialogue, hermeneutics, common sense, doxa
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The reported study was funded by RSF according to the research project № 24–18–00980,
https://rscf.ru/project/24–18–00980/ in Saint Petersburg University