Entering the theatre of Forms

scenes from a poetics and a dramaturgy to the present philosophy-making and its genesis in Plato’s Republic

Abstract

In this essay, I present some arguments in defense of a metaphilosophy proposal that provides a comprehensive, formal, and methodological answer to the question ‘how is philosophy made?’, taken as earlier and more fundamental than the traditional question ‘what is philosophy?’. This proposal is methodologically materialized through the idea of a poetics and dramaturgy of philosophy-making. The poetics of the philosophy-making has to do with a reappropriation of the classical trivium in the form of a philosophical trivium, made up of philosophical grammar, philosophical dialectics, and philosophical rhetoric. The ​​dramaturgy of the philosophy-making is associated with the polysemous notion of dialogue, understood as argumentative enactment. Then, I present a brief genealogy of the notion of theatrum philosophicum in its relation to the configurations assumed by the topics of theatrum mundi in the late medieval and early modern eras. Finally, I present how this relationship provides us with a way of access to make explicit the poetics and dramaturgy of the philosophy-making elaborated by Plato in Books V-VII of the Republic, thus showing that my proposal of metaphilosophy is contemporary, but has its genesis in this classic text.