In the nineteen-eighties, the Phaedrus became a major focus for Platonic scholarship and was widely used as a text on which to try out new lines of interpretation. Hence the choice of this dialogue as sole topic of the "Second Symposium Platonicum"
Discussions at the Symposium led to the exploration and evaluation of various ways of interpreting the dialogue, both traditional and innovatory. A generous selection of papers is included in the Proceedings. The section-headings include: relative chronology, rhetoric, 'philosophy' and 'dialectic' in the Phaedrus ; truth and limitations of writing; eros; soul and body; the Phaedrus and Plato's contemporaries'; philosophy and politics; the later reception of the Phaedrus .