DÉDALO Y PLATÓN: EL ESPACIO ESCULTÓRICO DEL EUTIFRÓN

Abstract

Unless one views metaphor as a prephilosophical tool to be erradicated from proper philosophy, the reader of Plato’s dialogues will find it interesting to investigate both the significance and the power of the great number of metaphors to be found in these works. The present text focuses on the comparison made by Plato at the end of his Euthyphro between the results of the enquiry about piety, on the one hand, and the living statues supposedly created by Daedalus, on the other hand. The claim I make here is that this metaphor has at least four virtues: 1) it offers ways of revisiting the reasons why the arguments failed; 2) it illustrates a peculiar sense of mimesis often disregarded by Plato’s interpreters; 3) it gives the enquiry on piety a cultural context that illuminates the conceptual frame of such enquiry as well as the very notion of piety in Ancient Greece; finally, (4), the metaphor is a joke whose several possible interpretations may say something about the interlocutors of this platonic dialogue as well as about ourselves as Plato’s readers.

Keywords

• Platón
• Eutifrón
• Dédalo
• estatuaria
• piedad
• mimesis
• logos
• broma.