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BackPhaedrus· The art of rhetoric

A name for the skill

Session 40 of 53265e–266e7 min

SocratesThe other, conversely, is the ability to cut things up into kinds along their natural joints, without trying to break any part like a bad butcher. Our two speeches just now first took unreason as a single common form. And just as a single body naturally has paired parts of the same name, some called left and others right, so the speeches treated derangement as a single kind in us. The first cut off its left-hand part and went on dividing it until it found there a sinister, left-handed love and condemned it with good reason. The other led us to the right-hand side of madness and found a love of the same name, but divine; having brought it forward, it praised it as the cause of our greatest blessings.

PhaedrusWhat you say is entirely true.

Here Plato pauses for you266b
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