David Crane
Lecturer
Greek and Roman Philosophy, Greek Literature
MA, UC Berkeley, 2005; AB, UChicago, 2002
Group: Recent PhDs
Contact information
Office: 7216 Dwinelle Hall
Email: dccrane@berkeley.edu
Selected publications
(Dissertation and papers delivered)
Dissertation: "Academic Dialectic in Platonic and Pseudo-Platonic Dialogue," May 2013
"Diegetics and Dialectic in Rival Lovers," Graduate Student Colloquium, Berkeley, May 2011
"Platonic Theater in Practice," 33rd Comparative Drama Conference, Los Angeles, March 2009
Personal statement
My dissertation considers the implications of what I call the Academic Hypothesis, which asserts that technical features of the 4th-century debating practices of Plato's Academy, described by Aristotle in his Topics and Sophistical Refutations, are embedded in both Platonic and pseudo-Platonic dialogues. I describe the process by which these features are embedded in the dialogues and explore the implications of this hypothesis for key issues in Platonic scholarship: e.g. the representation of sophists in the early dialogues; Socratic irony; the significance of a say-what-you-believe requirement; and the question of whether Socrates cheats in his arguments.
