A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
"Strauss's The Argument and the Action of Plato's 'Laws' reflects his interest in political thought, his dogged method of following the argument of the Laws step by step, and his vigorous defense of this dialogue's integrity in respect to the ideals of the Republic."—Cross Currents
"The unique characteristics of this commentary on the Laws reflect the care and precision which were the marks of Professor Strauss's efforts to understand the complex thoughts of other men."—Allan D. Nelson, Canadian Journal of Political Science
"Thorough and provocative, an important addition to Plato scholarship."—Library Journal
"The major purpose of the commentary is to provide a reading of the dialogue which displays its structural arrangement and the continuity of the argument."—J. W. Dy, Bibliographical Bulletin of Philosophy
"The reader of Strauss's book is indeed guided closely through the whole text."— M. J. Silverthorne, The Humanities Association Review
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago.
This volume brings together Seth Benardete’s studies of Hesiod, Homer, and Greek tragedy, eleven Platonic dialogues, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
The Argument of the Action spans four decades of Seth Benardete’s work, documenting its impressive range. Benardete’s philosophic reading of the poets and his poetic reading of the philosophers share a common ground, guided by the key he found in the Platonic dialogue: probing the meaning of speeches embedded in deeds, he uncovers the unifying intention of the work by tracing the way it unfolds through a movement of its own. Benardete’s original interpretations of the classics are the fruit of this discovery of the “argument of the action.”
Beginning with Plato was first published in 1944. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
These selected poems of Joseph Warren Beach range in time from the present year to the age of Pericles; in place from California to Shangri-La, from Paris to the Middle West; in theme from current political issues to the timeless problems of Greek philosophy; in mood from tender love to trenchant satire. In these fifty-odd poems is a rich variety—Anthony Eden and Cordell Hull, the French capital in the summer preceding the first World War, the skylines of the American West, the skylines of Minneapolis, soldier and swan maiden, and the inner life of man wherever lived. Mr. Beach can tell home truths without bitterness, and handle nostalgic emotion without sentimentality.
“The translations are masterpieces of literalness. . . . They are honest, accurate, and give the reader a wonderful sense of the Greek.”—Drew A. Hyland, Review of Metaphysics
In Beyond Being, Brice R. Wachterhauser contends that this perceived bifurcation in Gadamer's work oversimplifies and distorts important parts of Gadamer's thought. Wachterhauser argues that only by viewing Gadamer's contribution to philosophy as an integrated whole and by reading Gadamer's hermeneutical studies in light of his Plato studies are we able to avoid certain key misunderstandings of Gadamer, as well as to comprehend more clearly the radical implications of Gadamer's thought.
In addition to acknowledging familiar themes in the interpretation of the Republic—the sincerity of its utopianism, the justice of the philosopher's return to the Cave—Ferrari provocatively engages secondary literature by Leo Strauss, Bernard Williams, and Jonathan Lear. With admirable clarity and insight, Ferrari conveys the relation between the city and the soul and the choice between tyranny and philosophy. City and Soul in Plato's Republic will be of value to students of classics, philosophy, and political theory alike.
"A major addition to the literature on the Meno and necessary reading for every student of the dialogue."—Alexander Seasonske, Philosophical Review
"There exists no other commentary on Meno which is so thorough, sound, and enlightening."—Choice
Jacob Klein (1899-1978) was a student of Martin Heidegger and a tutor at St. John's College from 1937 until his death. His other works include Plato's Trilogy: Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Statesman, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Chapter by chapter, Deep Rhetoric develops an understanding of rhetoric not only in its philosophical dimension but also as a means of guiding and conducting conflicts, achieving justice, and understanding the human condition. Along the way, Crosswhite restores the traditional dignity and importance of the discipline and illuminates the twentieth-century resurgence of rhetoric among philosophers, as well as the role that rhetoric can play in future discussions of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. At a time when the fields of philosophy and rhetoric have diverged, Crosswhite returns them to their common moorings and shows us an invigorating new way forward.
John V. Garner convincingly refines previous interpretations and uncovers a profound thesis in the Philebus: genuine learners find value not only in stable being but also in the process of becoming. Further, since genuine learning arises in pluralistic communities where people form and inform one another, those who are truly open to learning are precisely those who actively shape the betterment of humanity.
The Emerging Good in Plato’s "Philebus" thus connects the Philebus’s grand philosophical ideas about the order of values, on the one hand, to its intimate and personal account of the experience of learning, on the other. It shows that this dialogue, while agreeing broadly with themes in more widely studied works by Plato such as the Republic, Gorgias, and Phaedo, also develops a unique way of salvaging the whole of human life, including our ever-changing nature.
Pieper gives interpretation of the dialogue. Leaving the more recondite scholarly preoccupations aside, he concentrates on the content, bringing the actual situation in the dialogue – Athens and its intellectuals engaged in spirited debate – alive. Equally alive is the discussion of ideas, which are brought to bear on contemporary experience and made to prove the perennial validity of Socratic wisdom, and its power to excite the mind. The main thesis – that in poetry and in love man is "beside himself," that is, divinely inspired - is discussed with reference to modern poets, novelists, and modern psychology.
Censorship, Nadaff argues, is not merely a mechanism of silencing but also provokes new ways of speaking about controversial and crucial cultural and artistic events. It functions philosophically in the Republic to subvert Plato's most crucial arguments about politics, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Naddaff develops this stunning argument through an extraordinary reading of Plato's work. In books 2 and 3, the first censorship of poetry, she finds that Plato constitutes the poet as a rival with whom the philosopher must vie agonistically. In other words, philosophy does not replace poetry, as most commentators have suggested; rather, the philosopher becomes a worthy and ultimately victorious poetic competitor. In book 10's second censorship, Plato exiles the poets as a mode of self-subversion, rethinking and revising his theory of mimesis, of the immortality of the soul, and, most important, the first censorship of poetry. Finally, in a subtle and sophisticated analysis of the myth of Er, Naddaff explains how Plato himself censors his own censorships of poetry, thus producing the unexpected result of a poetically animated and open-ended dialectical philosophy.
A comprehensive study of “one of the most elusive and subtle” of all the Platonic dialogues.
The Gorgias begins with a discussion of the nature and value of rhetoric and develops into an impassioned argument for the primacy of absolute right (as expressed by conscience) in the regulation of both public and private life. Plochmann and Robinson closely analyze this great dialogue in the first two-thirds of their book, turning in the final four chapters to a broader discussion of its unity, sweep, and philosophic implications.
In Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric, Bruce McComiskey achieves three rhetorical goals: he treats a single sophist's rhetorical technê (art) in the context of the intellectual upheavals of fifth-century bce Greece, thus avoiding the problem of generalizing about a disparate group of individuals; he argues that we must abandon Platonic assumptions regarding the sophists in general and Gorgias in particular, opting instead for a holistic reading of the Gorgianic fragments; and he reexamines the practice of appropriating sophistic doctrines, particularly those of Gorgias, in light of the new interpretation of Gorgianic rhetoric offered in this book.
In the first two chapters, McComiskey deals with a misconception based on selective and Platonic readings of the extant fragments: that Gorgias's rhetorical technê involves the deceptive practice of manipulating public opinion. This popular and ultimately misleading interpretation of Gorgianic doctrines has been the basis for many neosophistic appropriations. The final three chapters deal with the nature and scope of neosophistic rhetoric in light of the non-Platonic and holistic interpretation of Gorgianic rhetoric McComiskey postulates in his opening chapters. He concludes by examining the future of communication studies to discover what roles neosophistic doctrines might play in the twenty-first century.
McComiskey also provides a selective bibliography of scholarship on sophistic rhetoric and philosophy in English since 1900.
As editors Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore remark, a simple way to describe Heidegger's reading of Plato might be to say that what began as an attempt to appropriate Plato (and through him a large portion of Western philosophy) finally ended in an estrangement from both Plato and Western philosophy. The authors of this volume consider Heidegger's thought in relation to Plato before and after the "Kehre" or turn. In doing so, they take up various central issues in Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) and thereafter, and the questions of hermeneutics, truth, and language. The result is a subtle and multifaceted reinterpretation of Heidegger's position in the tradition of philosophy, and of Plato's role in determining that position.
In addition to a careful and precise analysis of Plato’s Phaedo,Parmenides, and Symposium, Lampert shows that properly entwined, Plato’s three dialogues fuse to portray a young thinker entering philosophy’s true radical power. Lampert reveals why this radicality needed to be guarded and places this discussion within the greater scheme of the politics of philosophy.
Here Rosen’s argue for the possibility of philosophy or the retrieval of human self-knowledge on the basis of a renewed argument for the partial intelligibility of ordinary experience or, in other words, for the Platonic Ideas. His book on the Symposium was an important contribution to the subsequent sea change in Plato scholarship that returned attention to the dialogue form and to the poetic side of philosophy even in its quarrel with philosophy. That change allowed us search for understanding in the light of the whole, a whole which is otherwise, as Rosen has shown elsewhere, fragmented by the scientism of analytical philosophy or the historicism of “Continental” philosophy.
The Language of Love represents a missing key to Stanley Rosen’s work and, much more significantly, to the rediscovery of philosophy in our time. The title of the book is not merely a play on words. It points to the incommensurability between the constructed or historical nature of language or culture and the pre-discursive apprehension of things that is necessary if speech is to make sense and be understood, as opposed to being mere nonsense.
Among many valuable insights along the way, Rosen unites the dialogue in two parts, treating both eros and rhetoric, showing the linkage between eros and writing, as between myth and analysis. He connects the comic attempt to subject eros to diaeresis in the Phaedrus with the attempt to understand non-being as an eidos in the Sophist. In both cases, the inadequacy of a technical understanding of philosophy returns us to the pre-technical world of ordinary experience.
Rosen’s interpretation is an expression of the Socratic claim that we can’t speak beautifully without knowing the truth and that whatever truth we speak or write is a reflection of the silent invisibility of beauty as the unity of form. However, “Like every good teacher, it does not simply state that link for us to memorize. Instead, we must recollect it.”
"Because it succeeds in being both literal and comprehensive, it is by far superior to any translation available. By reproducing dramatic detail often omitted, such as oaths, hesitations, repetitions, and forms of address, Pangle allows the reader to follow the dialogue's interplay between argument and dramatic context. . . . Pangle's translation captures the excitement and the drama of Plato's text."—Mary P. Nichols, Ancient Philosophy
"Pangle's achievement is remarkable. . . . The accompanying interpretive essay is an excellent distillation of a dialogue three times its size. The commentary is thoughtful, even profound; and it amply demonstrates the importance of reading Plato carefully and from a translation that is true to his language."—Patrick Coby, American Political Science Review
In Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, the eminent Nietzsche scholar Laurence Lampert offers a controversial new assessment of the Strauss-Nietzsche connection. Lampert undertakes a searching examination of the key Straussian essay, "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil." He shows that this essay, written toward the end of Strauss's life and placed at the center of his final work, reveals an affinity for and debt to Nietzsche greater than Strauss's followers allow. Lampert argues that the essay comprises the most important interpretation of Nietzsche ever published, one that clarifies Nietzsche's conception of nature and of human spiritual history and demonstrates the logical relationship between the essential themes in Nietzsche's thought—the will to power and the eternal return.
This book offers a transcript of Strauss’s seminar on Plato’s Protagoras taught at the University of Chicago in the spring quarter of 1965, edited and introduced by renowned scholar Robert C. Bartlett. These lectures have several important features. Unlike his published writings, they are less dense and more conversational. Additionally, while Strauss regarded himself as a Platonist and published some work on Plato, he published little on individual dialogues. In these lectures Strauss treats many of the great Platonic and Straussian themes: the difference between the Socratic political science or art and the Sophistic political science or art of Protagoras; the character and teachability of virtue, its relation to knowledge, and the relations among the virtues, courage, justice, moderation, and wisdom; the good and the pleasant; frankness and concealment; the role of myth; and the relation between freedom of thought and freedom of speech.
In these lectures, Strauss examines Protagoras and the sophists, providing a detailed discussion of Protagoras as it relates to Plato’s other dialogues and the work of modern thinkers. This book should be of special interest to students both of Plato and of Strauss.
To recover that language, Fraistat turns to three prominent philosophers—Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and William Godwin—who illuminate the varied ways caring language and caring values have structured core debates in the history of Western political thought about the proper role of government, as well as the rights and responsibilities of citizens. The Liberalism of Care presents a distinctive vision for our liberal politics where political communities and citizens can utilize the ethic and practices of care to face practical challenges.
Nowhere is Montesquieu’s critique of the despotic ideas of Europe more powerful than in his enormously influential The Spirit of the Laws, and Vickie B. Sullivan guides readers through Montesquieu’s sometimes veiled, yet sharply critical accounts of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as various Christian thinkers. He finds deleterious consequences, for example, in brutal Machiavellianism, in Hobbes’s justifications for the rule of one, in Plato’s reasoning that denied slaves the right of natural defense, and in the Christian teachings that equated heresy with treason and informed the Inquisition.
In this new reading of Montesquieu’s masterwork, Sullivan corrects the misconception that it offers simple, objective observations, showing it instead to be a powerful critique of European politics that would become remarkably and regrettably prescient after Montesquieu’s death when despotism wound its way through Europe.
Walter T. Schmid offers the first original interpretation of the Laches since Hermann Bonitz in the nineteenth century in the only full-length commentary on the Laches available in English.
Schmid divides the book into five main discussions: the historical background of the dialogue; the relation of form and content in a Platonic dialogue and specific structural and aesthetic features of the Laches; the first half of the dialogue, which introduces the characters and considers the theme of the education of young men; the inquiry with Laches, which examines the traditional Greek conception of military courage; and the inquiry with Nicias in which two nontraditional conceptions of courage are mooted, one closely associated with the sophistic movement in Athens, the other with Socrates himself. Furnishing a detailed paragraph-by-paragraph reading that traces Socrates’ ongoing quest for virtue and wisdom—a wisdom founded in the action of a whole human life—Schmid conclusively shows how and why the Laches fills an important niche in Plato’s moral theory.
At the end of Plato’s Parmenides, Parmenides concludes that “whether ‘the One’ is or is not, it and ‘the Others’ both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear, all things in all ways.” Throughout the history of philosophy various attempts have been made to make sense of Plato’s puzzling dialectical exercise. In this ambitious book Andrew Cutrofello shows how Kant and Hegel extended it, how contemporary philosophers, including Graham Priest and Alain Badiou, have reinterpreted it, and how poets such as Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, and Susan Howe have channeled it. What emerges is an original conception of the history of metaphysics as a series of antinomies, and of metaphysical poetry as a type of antinomianism.
In this interpretive commentary on Theaetetus, Gregory Kirk makes a major contribution to scholarship on Plato by emphasizing the relevance of the interpersonal dynamics between the interlocutors for the interpretation of the dialogue’s central arguments about knowledge. Kirk attends closely to the personalities of the participants in the dialogue, focusing especially on the unique demands faced by a student—in this case, Theaetetus—and the ways in which one can embrace or deflect the responsibilities of learning. Kirk’s approach gives equal consideration to the dual demands of dramatic interpretation and philosophical argument that constitute the unique character of the Platonic text, and he develops an original interpretation of the Theaetetus, concluding that the uncertainty that characterizes wisdom supersedes the certainty of knowledge.
"This study demonstrates how the Statesman is the culminating expression of Plato''s lifelong effort, both in Athens and in the Academy, to bring metaphysical insight to the unending political crisis of his times."The Philosopher in Plato's Statesman a trail-blazing work. While not every reader will agree with the lessons Miller himself draws from this approach, none should fail to be impressed by its interpretive power. All this is exciting stuff. The interpretive pathway on which Miller has embarked has the potential for changing the face of scholarship on the late Platonic dialogues. Parmenides [Publishing] is to be commended for making these two important contributions available under a single cover." --Kenneth Sayre, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
"Miller casts considerable light on virtually every aspect of the dialogue. . . . All in all, this book is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the Statesman." --Stanley Rosen, Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, Boston University
MITCHELL MILLER is Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. He is the author of Plato's Parmenides.
This anthology of primary texts gathers an incredibly large number of the most important philosophical writings on art and aesthetics from the ancient Greeks to contemporary thought. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns present English-language translations of works of
- Plato
- Aristotle
- Plotinus
- Augustine
- Marsilio Ficino
- Earl of Shaftesbury
- Kant
- Schelling
- Hegel
- Schopenhauer
- Nietzsche
- Benedetto Croce
- John Dewey
- Heidegger
“If only every introductory course were as engaging as Philosophy 101 by Peter Kreeft! Kreeft offers a marvelous way of using Plato’s Apology both to introduce the whole scope of philosopher and to evoke a personal response. Even the diffident freshman, prone to keeping a new subject like philosopher as arm’s length, will feel the enchantment of love-for-wisdom that philosophy is supposed to be.” – Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., chair, Department of Philosophy, Fordham University
“A terrific introduction to philosophy through this not uncontroversial commentary on Plato’s Apology. Not everyone will agree that Socrates provided the best possible defense for himself nor that he intended to. But Kreeft’s is an eminently defensible reading of the Apology and will awaken many a student to the delights of Plato and Philosophy. The comparisons of Socrates with Christ are fascinating. This book will go a long way to consoling those who are not privileged to have Socrates or Kreeft as teachers in the flesh.” – Janet Smith, Sacred Heart Major Seminary, Detroit
In Philosophy as Agôn: A Study of Plato's Gorgias and Related Texts, Robert Metcalf offers a fresh interpretation of Plato's dialogues as dramatic texts whose philosophy is not so much a matter of doctrine as it is a dynamic, nondogmatic, and open-ended practice of engaging others in agonistic dialogue.
Metcalf challenges prevailing interpretations according to which the agôn (contest or struggle) between the interlocutors in the dialogues is inessential to Plato's philosophical purpose, or simply a reflection of the cultural background of ancient Greek life. Instead, he argues that Plato understands philosophy as essentially agonistic—involving the adversarial engagement of others in dialogue such that one's integrity is put to the test through this engagement, and where the agôn is structured so as to draw adversaries together in agreement about the matters at issue, though that agreement is always open to future contest.
Based on a careful reading of the Gorgias and related Socratic dialogues, such as Apology and Theaetetus, Metcalf contends that agôn is indispensable to the critique of prevailing opinions, to the transformation of the interlocutor through shame-inducing refutation, and to philosophy as a lifelong training (askêsis) of oneself in relation to others.
The essays gathered here each examine vital aspects of Plato’s many methods, considering his dialogues in relation to Thucydides and Homer, narrative strategies and medical practice, images and metaphors. They offer surprising new research into such much-studied works as The Republic as well as revealing views of lesser-known dialogues like the Cratylus and Philebus. With reference to thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Sartre, the authors place the Platonic dialogues in an illuminating historical context. Together, their essays should reinvigorate the scholarly examination of the way Plato’s dialogues “work”—and should prompt a reconsideration of how the form of Plato’s philosophical writing bears on the Platonic conception of philosophy.
Once again available in paperback, Plato is the first half of Eric Voegelin's Plato and Aristotle, the third volume of his five-volume Order and History, which has been hailed throughout the Western world as a monumental accomplishment of modern scholarship.
Marren makes this case by delving into Plato’s Republic, a foundational work of political philosophy. While the Republic straightforwardly condemns the decadence and greed of a tyrant, Plato’s attack on political idealism is both solemn and comedic. In fact, Plato draws on the same comedic stock and tropes as do Aristophanes’s plays. Marren’s book strikes up an innovative conversation between three works by Aristophanes—Assembly Women, Knights, and Birds—and Plato’s philosophy, prompting important questions about individual convictions and one’s personal search for justice. These dialogic works offer critiques of tyranny that are by turns brilliant, scathing, and exuberant, making light of faults and ideals alike. Philosophical comedy exposes despotism in individuals as well as systems of government claiming to be just and good. This critique holds as much bite against contemporary injustices as it did at the time of Aristophanes and Plato.
An ingenious new work by an emerging scholar, Plato and Aristophanes shows that comedy—in tandem with philosophy and politics—is essential to self-examination. And without such examination, there is no hope for a just life.
Plato’s dialogues are some of the most widely read texts in Western philosophy, and one would imagine them fully mined for elemental material. Yet, in Plato and Tradition, Patricia Fagan reveals the dialogues to be continuing sources of fresh insight. She recovers from them an underappreciated depth of cultural reference that is crucial to understanding their central philosophical concerns. Through careful readings of six dialogues, Fagan demonstrates that Plato’s presentation of Socrates highlights the centrality of tradition in political, erotic, and philosophic life. Plato embeds Socrates’s arguments and ideas in traditional references that would have been familiar to contemporaries of Socrates or Plato but that today’s reader typically passes over. Fagan’s book unpacks this cultural and literary context for the proper and full understanding of the philosophical argument of the Platonic dialogues. She concludes that, as Socrates demonstrates in word and deed, tradition is essential to successful living. But we must take up tradition with a critical openness to questioning its significance and future. Her original and compelling analyses may change the views of many readers who think themselves already well versed in the dialogues.
Winner, Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize
Achieving the remarkable feat of linking composition theory, deconstruction, and classical rhetoric, this book has been admirably summarized by the theorist G. Douglas Atkins, who writes: "This lively and engaging, informed and informative book constitutes an important contribution. Though its ‘field’ is most obviously composition, composition theory, and pedagogy, part of its importance derives from the way it transcends disciplinary boundaries to bear on writing in general. . . I know of no book that so fully and well discusses, and evaluates, the implications of deconstruction for composition and pedagogy. That [it] goes ‘beyond deconstruction,’ rather than merely ‘applying’ it, increases its importance and signals a clear contribution to the understanding of writing."
Jasper Neel analyzes the emerging field of composition studies within the epistemological and ontological debate over writing precipitated by Plato, who would have us abandon writing entirely, and continued by Derrida, who argues that all human beings are written. This book offers a three-part exploration of that debate. In the first part, a deconstructive reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, Neel shows the elaborate sleight-of-hand that Plato must employ as he uses writing to engage in a semblance of spoken dialogue.
The second part describes Derrida’s theory of writing and presents his famous argument that "the history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been. . .the debasement of writing, and its repression outside full speech." A lexicon of nine Derridean terms, the key to his theory of writing, is also included. At the end of this section, Neel turns deconstruction against itself, demonstrating that Derridean analysis collapses of its own weight.
The concluding section of the book juxtaposes the implications of Platonic and Derridean views of writing, warning that Derrida’s approach may lock writing inside philosophy. The conclusion suggests that writing may be liberated from philosophical judgment by turning to Derrida’s predecessors, the sophists, particularly Protagoras and Gorgias. Drawing on Protagoras’s idea of strong discourse, Neel shows that sophistry is the foundation of democracy: "Strong discourse is public discourse, which, though based on probability and not truth, remains persuasive over a long period of time to a great number of people. This publicly tested discourse exists only among competitors, never alone, but its ability to remain persuasive even when surrounded by other discourses enables the ideas of democracy to emerge and then keeps democracy alive."
Gerard Naddaf's substantial introduction shows the originality and importance both of Brisson's method and of Plato's analysis and places it in the context of contemporary debates over the origin and evolution of the oral tradition.
"[Brisson] contrasts muthos with the logos found at the heart of the philosophical reading. [He] does an excellent job of analyzing Plato's use of the two speech forms, and the translator's introduction does considerable service in setting the tone."—Library Journal
In the first of his eight lectures, Peter Kreeft defines Platonism and its “Big Idea,” the idea of a transcendent reality that the history of philosophy has labeled “Platonic Ideas” or Platonic Forms. In the second lecture, he briefly explores Plato’s two basic predecessors or sources, myth and Socrates; and then looks at 12 applications of the Forms in Plato’s own dialogues. The third lecture covers the three most important modifications or additions to Plato himself in the Platonic tradition: Aristotle, Plotinus, and Augustine, each of whom gave the Forms a new metaphysical address. The fourth lecture explores six Christian Platonists, three in the New Testament and three philosophers, Justin Martyr, Bonaventure, and Aquinas.
An insightful commentary on Plato’s Laws, his complex final work.
The Laws was Plato’s last work, his longest, and one of his most difficult. In contrast to the Republic, which presents an abstract ideal, the Laws appears to provide practical guidelines for the establishment and maintenance of political order in the real world. Classicist Seth Benardete offers a rich analysis of each of the twelve books of the Laws, which illuminates Plato’s major themes and arguments concerning theology, the soul, justice, and education.
Most importantly, Benardete shows how music in a broad sense, including drama, epic poetry, and even puppetry, mediates between reason and the city in Plato’s philosophy of law. Benardete also uncovers the work’s concealed ontological dimension, explaining why it is hidden and how it can be brought to light. In establishing the coherence and underlying organization of Plato’s last dialogue, Benardete makes a significant contribution to Platonic studies.
Faced with the difficult task of discerning Plato’s true ideas from the contradictory voices he used to express them, scholars have never fully made sense of the many incompatibilities within and between the dialogues. In the magisterial Plato’s Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert explains for the first time how these prose dramas cohere to reveal a comprehensive Platonic understanding of philosophy.
To expose this coherence, Zuckert examines the dialogues not in their supposed order of composition but according to the dramatic order in which Plato indicates they took place. This unconventional arrangement lays bare a narrative of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. In the drama’s earliest dialogues, for example, non-Socratic philosophers introduce the political and philosophical problems to which Socrates tries to respond. A second dramatic group shows how Socrates develops his distinctive philosophical style. And, finally, the later dialogues feature interlocutors who reveal his philosophy’s limitations. Despite these limitations, Zuckert concludes, Plato made Socrates the dialogues’ central figure because Socrates raises the fundamental human question: what is the best way to live?
Plato’s dramatization of Socratic imperfections suggests, moreover, that he recognized the apparently unbridgeable gap between our understandings of human life and the nonhuman world. At a time when this gap continues to raise questions—about the division between sciences and the humanities and the potentially dehumanizing effects of scientific progress—Zuckert’s brilliant interpretation of the entire Platonic corpus offers genuinely new insights into worlds past and present.
"Seth Benardete is one of the very few contemporary classicists who combine the highest philological competence with a subtlety and taste that approximate that of the ancients. At the same time, he as set himself the entirely modern hermeneutical task of uncovering what the ancients preferred to keep veiled, of making explicit what they indicated, and hence...of showing the naked ugliness of artificial beauty."—Stanley Rose, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal
Seth Benardete (1930-2001) was professor of classics at New York University. He was the author or translator of many books, most recently The Argument of the Action, Plato's "Laws," and Plato's "Symposium," all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Theaetetus is the first of a trilogy of Platonic dialogues that show Socrates formulating his conception of philosophy as he prepares the defense for his trial. This translation is particularly faithful to the original Greek, and it is accompanied by an introduction, extensive notes, and comprehensive commentary that puts the dialogue in context with Plato's thought and its influence over the centuries.
Seth Benardete (1930-2001) was professor of classics at New York University.
"Seth Benardete is one of the very few contemporary classicists who combine the highest philological competence with a subtlety and taste that approximate that of the ancients. At the same time, he as set himself the entirely modern hermeneutical task of uncovering what the ancients preferred to keep veiled, of making explicit what they indicated, and hence...of showing the naked ugliness of artificial beauty."—Stanley Rose, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal
Seth Benardete (1930-2001) was professor of classics at New York University. He was the author or translator of many books, most recently The Argument of the Action, Plato's "Laws," and Plato's "Symposium," all published by the University of Chicago Press.
Cropsey interprets seven of Plato's dialogues—Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Sophist, Statesman, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo—in light of their dramatic consecutiveness and thus as a conceptual and dramatic whole. The cosmos depicted by Plato in these dialogues, Cropsey argues, is often unreasonable, and populated by human beings unaided by gods and dealt with equivocally by nature. Masterfully leading the reader through the seven scenes of the drama, Cropsey shows how they are, to an astonishing degree, concerned with the resources available to help us survive in such a world.
This is a world—and a Plato—quite at odds with most other portraits. Much more than a summary of Plato's thinking, this book is an eloquent, sometimes amusing, often moving guide to the paradoxes and insights of Plato's philosophy.
With Poetic Justice, Jill Frank overturns the conventional view that the Republic endorses a hierarchical ascent to knowledge and the authoritarian politics associated with that philosophy. When learning to read is understood as the passive absorption of a teacher’s beliefs, this reflects the account of Platonic philosophy as authoritative knowledge wielded by philosopher kings who ruled the ideal city. When we learn to read by way of the method Socrates introduces in the Republic, Frank argues, we are offered an education in ethical and political self-governance, one that prompts citizens to challenge all claims to authority, including those of philosophy.
Guiding the reader through the key arguments of the classic figures of Western political philosophy, from Plato through to the modern era, this revised edition includes new essays on Aristotle's 'Politics', Confucianism, Islamic social philosophy and Nazism, as well as additional material on 'Roman Law', Anarchism and 'anti-capitalism'.
Cohen moves chronologically through the development of political philosophy. He presents key texts in their own terms, before offering short, precise analyses of their strengths, weaknesses and influence. The book finishes with a discussion of modern liberalism and conservatism.
Providing both a broad overview and precise summaries of key ideas, this is an invaluable guide for all students of political thought.
The leading scholars represented in Politics, Philosophy, Writing examine six key Platonic dialogues and the most important of the epistles, moving from Plato's most public or political writings to his most philosophical. The collection is intended to demonstrate the unity of Plato's concerns, the literary quality of his writing, and the integral relation of form and content in his work. Taken together, these essays show the consistency of Plato's understanding of the political art, the art of writing, and the philosophical life.
Studies emphasizing the unity of Plato's lifework have given way in recent scholarship to specialized and overspecialized examinations of individual dialogues. While each of the contributors to Politics, Philosophy, Writing studies one text, his or her work is oriented toward illuminating the whole of Plato's project. Each of the essays is an innovative contribution to scholarship on its topic; as a collection, they constitute a unique reading of Plato's political philosophy.
Plato scholars have generally divided themselves into two camps: those who concentrate on the analytic or logical aspects of the dialogues, and those who concentrate on the literary-critical features. In one camp are the philologists and classicists, and in the other, the writers of inventive interpretive commentaries. By avoiding distinctions between Plato the poet and Plato the philosopher, Politics, Philosophy, Writing allows a deeper exploration of the comprehensiveness of Plato's theoretical vision and illuminates the lasting challenge of his understanding of the human condition.
On the other hand, blindness to the merits of postmodern thought is also due to Anglo-American philology’s own parochial instincts. Ensconced within a nineteenth-century model of Alterumswissenschaft, only a minority of classicists have made forays into philosophical, psychoanalytic, and other speculative modes of inquiry. The result has been that postmodern French thought has largely been the province of scholars of modern languages.
A situation thus emerges in which most classicists do not know theory, and so cannot appreciate the scope of these thinkers’ contribution to our understanding of the genealogy of Western thought, while most theorists do not know the Platonic texts and their contexts that ground them. This book bridges this gap, offering detailed and theoretically informed readings of French postmodernism’s chief thinkers’ debts to Plato and the ancient world.
Charles Kahn taught Classics and Philosophy at Columbia University from 1957 to 1965, and has since been teaching in the Philosophy Department of the University of Pennsylvania. He spent a year as Visiting Professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and had additional Visiting Fellowships at Balliol College, Oxford and Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a term as Visiting Professor at Harvard. He is the recipient of several prestigious research grants, from the American Council of Learned Societies (1963/64 and 1984/85), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1974/75 and 1990/91), and the Guggenheim Foundation (1979/80). In 2000 he was elected Fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, The Verb “Be” in Ancient Greek, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, and Essays on Being. His latest book,Plato and the Post-Socratic Dialogue, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
Sarah Broadie
Lesley Brown
Tomás Calvo-Martínez
Diskin Clay
John M. Dillon
Dorothea Frede
Arnold Hermann
Carl A. Huffman
Enrique Hülsz Piccone
D. M. Hutchinson
Paul Kalligas
Vassilis Karasmanis
Aryeh Kosman
Anthony A. Long
Richard McKirahan
Susan Sauvé Meyer
Alexander P.D.Mourelatos
Satoshi Ogihara
Richard Patterson
Christopher J. Rowe
David Sedley
Richard Sorabji
An oracle was reported to have said, "No one is wiser than Socrates." And in fact it was Socrates’ life’s work to interpret these words, which demanded and defined the practice of philosophy. Each of these original essays attends carefully to the specifics of the Apology, looking to its dramatic details, its philosophic teaching, and its complexity as a work of writing to bring into focus the "Socrates" of the Apology.
Overall, the contributors, distinguished scholars of ancient philosophy, share a belief in the unity of the letter and the spirit of Platonic philosophy: the conviction that the Platonic text cannot be reached except through reading and cannot be read except through thinking. In this way, the readings in this volume mirror Socrates’ own hermeneutical practice of uniting the demands of the mind and the demands of the text—the Socratic "examination." The result, true to the Socratic injunction that the unexamined life is not worth living, continues that practice of examination, here offering a reexamination of Socrates in the Apology.
The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy, one of the most groundbreaking works of twentieth-century Platonic studies, is now back in print for a new generation of students and scholars to discover. In this volume, distinguished classicist Seth Benardete interprets and pairs two important Platonic dialogues, the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, illuminating Socrates’ notion of rhetoric and Plato’s conception of morality and eros in the human soul.
Following his discussion of the Gorgias as a dialogue about the rhetoric of morality, Benardete turns to the Phaedrus as a discourse about genuine rhetoric, namely the science of eros, or true philosophy. This novel interpretation addresses numerous issues in Plato studies: the relation between the structure of the Gorgias and the image of soul/city in the Republic, the relation between the structure of Phaedrus and the concept of eros, and Socrates’ notion of ignorance, among others.
As Kastely shows, the Republic begins with two interrelated crises: one rhetorical, one philosophical. In the first, democracy is defended by a discourse of justice, but no one can take this discourse seriously because no one can see—in a world where the powerful dominate the weak—how justice is a value in itself. That value must be found philosophically, but philosophy, as Plato and Socrates understand it, can reach only the very few. In order to reach its larger political audience, it must become rhetoric; it must become a persuasive part of the larger culture—which, at that time, meant epic poetry. Tracing how Plato and Socrates formulate this transformation in the Republic, Kastely isolates a crucial theory of persuasion that is central to how we talk together about justice and organize ourselves according to democratic principles.
When Athenians suffered the shame of having lost a war from their own greed and foolishness, around 404 BCE the public’s blame was directed at Socrates, a man whose unique appearance and behavior, as well as his disapproval of the democracy, made him a ready target. Socrates was subsequently put on trial and sentenced to death. However, as René Girard has pointed out, no individual can be held responsible for a communal crisis. Plato’s Apology depicts Socrates as both the bane and the cure of Greek society, while his Crito shows a sacrificial Socrates, what some might consider a pharmakos figure, the human drug through whom Plato can dispense his philosophical remedies. With tremendous insight and satisfying complexity, this book analyzes classical texts through the lens of Girard’s mimetic mechanism.
Robin Reames’s Seeming & Being in Plato’s Rhetorical Theory marks a shift in Plato scholarship. Reames argues that an appropriate understanding of rhetorical theory in Plato’s dialogues illuminates how he developed the technical vocabulary needed to construct the very distinctions between seeming and being that separate true from false speech. By engaging with three key movements of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Plato scholarship—the rise and subsequent marginalization of “orality and literacy theory,” Heidegger’s controversial critique of Platonist metaphysics, and the influence of literary or dramatic readings of the dialogues—Reames demonstrates how the development of Plato’s rhetorical theory across several of his dialogues (Gorgias, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Theaetetus, Cratylus, Republic, and Sophist) has been both neglected and misunderstood.
In Setting Plato Straight, Todd W. Reeser undertakes the first sustained and comprehensive study of Renaissance textual responses to Platonic same-sex sexuality. Reeser mines an expansive collection of translations, commentaries, and literary sources to study how Renaissance translators transformed ancient eros into non-erotic, non-homosexual relations. He analyzes the interpretive lenses translators employed and the ways in which they read and reread Plato’s texts. In spite of this cleansing, Reeser finds surviving traces of Platonic same-sex sexuality that imply a complicated, recurring process of course-correction—of setting Plato straight.
When the winds fall, the sailor picks up his oars, no longer relying on help outside his own power. This “second sailing,” according to the distinguished classicist Seth Benardete, is the essence of Socratic philosophizing
In this section-by-section commentary on Plato's most important dialogue, Benardete argues that the Republic is such a self-powered, holistic analysis of the beautiful, the good, and the just. This book provides a fresh interpretation of the Republic and a new understanding of philosophy as practiced by Plato and Socrates.
With Sophistry and Political Philosophy, Robert C. Bartlett provides the first close reading of Plato’s two-part presentation of Protagoras. In the “Protagoras,” Plato sets out the sophist’s moral and political teachings, while the “Theaetetus,” offers a distillation of his theoretical and epistemological arguments. Taken together, the two dialogues demonstrate that Protagoras is attracted to one aspect of conventional morality—the nobility of courage, which in turn is connected to piety. This insight leads Bartlett to a consideration of the similarities and differences in the relationship of political philosophy and sophistry to pious faith. Bartlett’s superb exegesis offers a significant tool for understanding the history of philosophy, but, in tracing Socrates’s response to Protagoras’ teachings, Bartlett also builds toward a richer understanding of both ancient sophistry and what Socrates meant by “political philosophy.”
Platonic discourses concerning the soul are incredibly rich and multitiered. Plato's own diverse and disparate arguments and images offer competing accounts of how we are to understand the nature of the soul. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that the accounts of Platonists who engage Plato’s dialogues are often riddled with questions. This volume takes up the theories of well-known philosophers and theologians, including Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, the emperor Julian, and Origen, as well as lesser-known but equally important figures in a collection of essays on topics such as transmigration of the soul, the nature of the Platonist enlightenment experience, soul and gender, pagan ritual practices, Christian and pagan differences about the soul, mental health and illness, and many other topics. Contributors include Crystal Addey, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Dirk Baltzly, Robert Berchman, Jay Bregman, Luc Brisson, Kevin Corrigan, John Dillon, John F. Finamore, Lloyd P. Gerson, Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum, Elizabeth Hill, Sarah Klitenic Wear, Danielle A. Layne, Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, Gregory Shaw, Svetla Slaveva-Griffine, Suzanne Stern-Gillet, Harold Tarrant, Van Tu, and John D. Turner.
"Exceptionally illuminating and philosophically sophisticated."
---Ted Cohen, Professor of Philosophy, University of Chicago
"In this audacious and long-awaited book, Joel Rudinow takes seriously a range of interrelated issues that most music theorizing is embarrassed to tackle. People often ask me about music and spirituality. With Soul Music, I can finally recommend a book that offers genuine philosophical insight into the topic."
---Theodore Gracyk, Professor of Philosophy, Minnesota State University Moorhead
The idea is as strange as it is commonplace---that the "soul" in soul music is more than just a name, that somehow the music truly taps into something essential rooted in the spiritual notion of the soul itself. Or is it strange? From the civil rights movement and beyond, soul music has played a key, indisputable role in moments of national healing. Of course, American popular music has long been embroiled in controversies over its spiritual purity (or lack thereof). But why? However easy it might seem to dismiss these ideas and debates as quaint and merely symbolic, they persist.
In Soul Music: Tracking the Spiritual Roots of Pop from Plato to Motown, Joel Rudinow, a philosopher of music, takes these peculiar notions and exposes them to serious scrutiny. How, Rudinow asks, does music truly work upon the soul, individually and collectively? And what does it mean to say that music can be spiritually therapeutic or toxic? This illuminating, meditative exploration leads from the metaphysical idea of the soul to the legend of Robert Johnson to the philosophies of Plato and Leo Strauss to the history of race and racism in American popular culture to current clinical practices of music therapy.
Joel Rudinow teaches in the Philosophy and Humanities Departments at Santa Rosa Junior College and is the coauthor of Invitation to Critical Thinking and the coeditor of Ethics and Values in the Information Age.
Marquez shows how this impasse is the key to understanding the ambiguous reevaluation of the rule of law that is the most striking feature of the political philosophy of the Statesman. The law appears here as a mere approximation of the expertise of the inevitably absent statesman, dim images and static snapshots of the clear and dynamic expertise required to steer the ship of state across the storms of the political world. Yet such laws, even when they are not created by genuine statesmen, can often provide the city with a limited form of cognitive capital that enables it to preserve itself in the long run, so long as citizens, and especially leaders, retain a “philosophical” attitude towards them. It is only when rulers know that they do not know better than the laws what is just or good (and yet want to know what is just and good) that the city can be preserved. The dialogue is thus, in a sense, the vindication of the philosopher-king in the absence of genuine political knowledge.
This accessible student commentary by Charles Platter presents an introduction to the Euthyphro, the full Greek text, and a commentary designed for undergraduates and selected graduate students. As part of the series Michigan Classical Commentaries, now edited by Josiah Osgood and Alexander Sens at Georgetown University, and K. Sara Myers at the University of Virginia, the volume is sized and priced for student use.
As his choice of title indicates, the heart of Strauss's work is Platonism—a Platonism that is altogether unorthodox and highly controversial. These essays consider, among others, Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche, Marx, Moses Maimonides, Machiavelli, and of course Plato himself to test the Platonic understanding of the conflict between philosophy and political society. Strauss argues that an awesome spritual impoverishment has engulfed modernity because of our dimming awareness of that conflict.
Thomas Pangle's Introduction places the work within the context of the entire Straussian corpus and focuses especially on Strauss's late Socratic writings as a key to his mature thought. For those already familiar with Strauss, Pangle's essay will provoke thought and debate; for beginning readers of Strauss, it provides a fine introduction. A complete bibliography of Strauss's writings if included.
Sallis’s work possesses an intrinsic power and originality, as well as deep interpretive insight. This book is a descriptive and critical journey through his thought, providing an overview for readers who wish to gain a sense of its sweep, along with discrete sections on particular philosophical disciplines for readers whose interests are more specific. It grapples with the challenges Sallis’s thought presents, making them explicit and opening them up to further consideration. And it attempts to locate his thought within both contemporary continental philosophy and philosophy as a whole. Essential for any student of continental philosophy, The Thought of John Sallis expounds on his work in a manner that increases access, honors its depth, and opens up unexplored possibilities for philosophy.
Duhem's 1908 essay questions the relation between physical theory and metaphysics and, more specifically, between astronomy and physics–an issue still of importance today. He critiques the answers given by Greek thought, Arabic science, medieval Christian scholasticism, and, finally, the astronomers of the Renaissance.
In The Tragedy and Comedy of Life, Seth Benardete focuses on the idea of the good in what is widely regarded as one of Plato's most challenging and complex dialogues, the Philebus. Traditionally the Philebus is interpreted as affirming the doctrine that the good resides in thought and mind rather than in pleasure or the body. Benardete challenges this view, arguing that Socrates vindicates the life of the mind over the life of pleasure not by separating the two and advocating a strict asceticism, but by mixing pleasure and pain with mind in such a way that the philosophic life emerges as the only possible human life.
Benardete combines a probing and challenging commentary that subtly mirrors and illuminates the complexities of this dialogue with the finest English translation of the Philebus yet available. The result is a work that will be of great value to classicists, philosophers, and political theorists alike.
The Verge of Philosophy is both an exploration of the limits of philosophy and a memorial for John Sallis’s longtime friend and interlocutor Jacques Derrida. The centerpiece of the book is an extended examination of three sites in Derrida’s thought: his interpretation of Heidegger regarding the privileging of the question; his account of the Platonic figure of the good; and his interpretation of Plato’s discourse on the crucial notion of the chora, the originating space of the universe.
Sallis’s reflections are given added weight—even poignancy—by his discussion of his many public and private philosophical conversations with Derrida over the decades of their friendship. This volume thus simultaneously serves to mourn and remember a friend and to push forward the deeply searching discussions that lie at the very heart of that friendship.
“All of John Sallis’s work is essential, but [this book] in particular is remarkable. . . . Sallis shows better than anyone I have ever read what it means to practice philosophy on the verge.”—Walter Brogan, Villanova University
Lorraine Smith Pangle traces the argument for the primacy of virtue and the power of knowledge throughout the five dialogues that feature them most prominently—the Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras, Meno, and Laws—and reveals the truth at the core of these seemingly strange claims. She argues that Socrates was more aware of the complex causes of human action and of the power of irrational passions than a cursory reading might suggest. Pangle’s perceptive analyses reveal that many of Socrates’s teachings in fact explore the factors that make it difficult for humans to be the rational creatures that he at first seems to claim. Also critical to Pangle’s reading is her emphasis on the political dimensions of the dialogues. Underlying many of the paradoxes, she shows, is a distinction between philosophic and civic virtue that is critical to understanding them.
Ultimately, Pangle offers a radically unconventional way of reading Socrates’s views of human excellence: Virtue is not knowledge in any ordinary sense, but true virtue is nothing other than wisdom.
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