Socrates and Diotima - (Breaking Feminist Waves) by Andrea Nye (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Few women's voices have survived from the antiquity period, but evidence shows that, especially in the area of religion, women were influential in Greek culture. Drawing on Socrates' Symposium, Nye advances this notion by not only exploring the original religious meaning of Diotima's teaching but also how that meaning has been lost throughout time.

Review Quotes

"This book is ambitious in scope. Nye first argues for a historically grounded reading of Plato's character, Diotima. Nye articulates a view of love and the divine that belonged to the historical Diotima. Nye engages in a thorough reading of the Symposium and other texts of the ancient Greek poetic, tragic, and philosophic tradition to support her reading of the authenticity of Diotima. Nye then traces how Diotima's view of love and the divine was suppressed and forgotten by the later western Christian tradition. She explores the cultural implications of that loss. This book stands to significantly alter the scholarly conversation about Diotima particularly and the role of the feminine in culture more generally." - Anne-Marie Schultz, Professor of Philosophy, Baylor University, USA

"Andrea Nye has done something wonderful in rescuing Eros from the priestly theologies that would have us banish and condemn it. Seekers will find in Socrates and Diotima a philosophy deeply consoling as well as erotic in itself. Like Cynthia Bourgeault's tantric Jesus, Nye's Diotima will draw you upward and outward into realms of reconciliation where the human dances with the divine and it may be possible to fall in love all over again with goodness, truth, and beauty." - Jean Feraca, Wisconsin Public Radio, USA and author of Crossing the Great Divide

"Nye gets into the mind of Diotima to deconstruct philosophers' view of sexuality, reproduction, and divinity in such a clearand compelling way that it dissolves those milennia-thick veils that shroud the histories of philosophy and religion. Nye shows that Diotima's conception of divinity and its relation to reproduction is not only a distinctively feminist one, but also one that undermines those surviving traditional conceptions of a heterosexual masculist deity that have historically diminished, discriminated against, and disrespected women as spiritual, moral beings." - Mary Ellen Waithe, Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Comparative Religion, Cleveland State University, USA

About the Author

Andrea Nye is Professor Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, USA.