I swear this happens EASILY about 80% of the time I go to a McDonalds, Burger King/Hungry Jacks etc. and people usually say “dumb kid working at McDonalds” but this is happening even when older people are handling the orders and NOT during busy periods like above.

Seriously, how hard is it to look at a screen and look in a bag and make sure everything is in there?

Short orders also seem to happen to most people I know, so it’s like it’s happening on a large scale, almost like they are trained to do it. Or is it just me? I even have conspiracy theories that when it happens in a drive thru, the worker is not punching the left out item into the computer and then pocketing the money for that item themselves. Just looking for motives to explain why it happens so much I guess.

On writing/speech: the trick, of course, is that whereas Socrates praises speech, in fact it is no less “material” than writing. It traffics in air and ears, tongues and tympanum. It’s “airy-ness” lends to the illusion of its being immaterial. But that’s an illusion. This is a line of deconstructive reading taken up in Derrida’s classic on this dialogue, “Plato’s Pharmacy.”

Thanks for your reflections on the Phaedrus.

Second, you’re right to sense an affirmation of (material) beauty at work here. There are competing trajectories in Plato’s corpus, which yielded different Neoplatonisms that would follow. Catherine Pickstock and other have a “theurgical” (and kind of “liturgical”) reading of Plato on materiality because of dialogues like the Phaedrus.

And your reflection on the voice over got me thinking: you might be right, though there’s a sort of ‘afterlife’ here, it seems more Platonic than Christian. After all, one would think a Christian account would lament the brokeness of his tragic death and separation from his family (just at the moment he realized they were all he wanted). On the other hand, I wonder: will we lament tragedy in heaven?

Nice job.

However, before that all comes back, the dialogue is going to focus on the second theme you note: love. Particularly love as a kind of “inspiration,” even a kind of madness.

It might be helpful, as you continue to read the Phaedrus, to sort of see it as a dialogue situated “between” the Republic and the Symposium.

I’ll look forward to the next summary.

And it’s interesting to open with the nature/culture distinction. You’re right that both can be material mediators of the divine (or, in Plato’s case, the intelligible). The culture that humans create (cathedrals, paintings, etc.) are elucidations of nature. But in the dialogue, we’ll also see that the beautiful face of Phaedrus plays an important role, which is a case of nature having the same function.