@article{Capra_2017, title={Seeing through Plato’s Looking Glass. Mythos and Mimesis from Republic to Poetics}, volume={10}, url={https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/918}, DOI={10.13128/Aisthesis-20905}, abstractNote={<p class="p1">This paper revisits Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on <em>mimesis</em> with a special emphasis on <em>mythos</em> as an integral part of it. I argue that the <em>Republic</em>’s notorious “mirror argument” is in fact <em>ad hominem</em>: first, Plato likely has in mind Agathon’s mirror in Aristophanes’ <em>Thesmoforiazusae</em>, where tragedy is construed as <em>mimesis</em>; second, the tongue-in-cheek claim that mirrors can reproduce invisible Hades, when read in combination with the following eschatological myth, suggests that Plato was not committed to a mirror-like view of art; third, the very omission of <em>mythos</em> shows that the argument is a self-consciously one-sided one, designed to caricature the artists’ own pretensions of mirror-like realism. These points reinforce Stephen Halliwell’s claim that Western aesthetics has been haunted by a «ghostly misapprehension» of Plato’s mirror. Further evidence comes from Aristotle’s “literary” (as opposed to Plato’s “sociological”) discussion: rather than to the “mirror argument”, the beginning of the <em>Poetics</em> points to the <em>Phaedo</em> as the best source of information about Plato’s views on poetry.</p>}, number={1}, journal={Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico}, author={Capra, Andrea}, year={2017}, month={Jul.}, pages={75–86} }