The Dialogues of Plato

Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Gorgias, Menexenus (Dialogues of Plato)

Hardcover, 384 pages

English language

Published April 14, 1985 by Yale Univ Pr.

ISBN:
978-0-300-03226-0
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3 stars (2 reviews)

Writing in the fourth century B.C., in an Athens that had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Plato formulated questions that have haunted the moral, religious, and political imagination of the West for more than 2,000 years: what is virtue? How should we love? What constitutes a good society? Is there a soul that outlasts the body and a truth that transcends appearance? What do we know and how do we know it? Plato's inquiries were all the more resonant because he couched them in the form of dramatic and often highly comic dialogues, whose principal personage was the ironic, teasing, and relentlessly searching philosopher Socrates.In this splendid collection, Scott Buchanan brings together the most important of Plato's dialogues, including Protagoras, The Symposium, with its barbed conjectures about the relation between love and madness, Phaedo and The Republic, his monumental work of political philosophy. Buchanan's learned and engaging …

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Plato: Five Dialogues is surprisingly easily readable, and digestible, despite being an ancient text; I suppose, more or less, this is a testament to the quality of G. M. A. Grube's translation, and I can only hope not many of Plato's ideas were misrepresented or obscured in the process.



When looked at with the benefit of more than two thousand years of hindsight, the underlying axioms supporting Plato's arguments predictably do not hold up under scrutiny; however, they make for an engaging and relatively valuable read if one takes them for what they are: a product of a relentless, one-man's crusade to make sense of the world around him.



Regrettably, and solely because there are many more pertinent and arguably more valuable works of philosophy out there, I can recommend these five dialogues only as a prerequisite to other contemporary, more relevant ideas, but, as an independent …

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Subjects

  • History & Surveys - Ancient & Classical
  • Ancient Western philosophy to c 500
  • Plato
  • Philosophy

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