"The project examines the modalities, place, status, and roles of fictional elements in Platonic dialogues. The Applicant proposes an inquiry into the nature of Platonic fiction based on a selection of characteristic themes offered as fictional by characters in various Plato’s dialogues. The analysis will aim at a better understanding of the modes of fictionality Plato used, and, as a result, of the Platonic dialogue as a whole. The work hypothesis to be examined is: (1) Plato used various false or unproved claims, frequently put into images, in a manner very different from modern literary fictional modes of writing; (2) Plato needed fictions in philosophy. He replaced arguments with structured pictures and complex rhetorical structures involving images and pictures, with the aims like constructing and testing holistic vision out of fragmentary conclusions, or like creating a cognitive laboratory for building abstractions he needed in philosophy. The Applicant hopes for an elucidation of the manner in which the abstract thinking was constituted as a method of inquiry through a practice of non-abstract forms of thinking. The results of the project will be a book manuscript, conference and journal papers, and a detailed project of an accessible and attractive textbook of logic, using the method of imaginations in order to introduce students to abstract thinking. The project will allow the Applicant to move to the stage of mature research, and will give him the capacities and additional skills (like career and research group management) necessary to compete in the European intellectual market, and to transfer the practices of the modern research in humanities to Eastern Europe. It will help to foster European competitiveness by offering a new approach to teaching abstract thinking in the universities."