Tag: Ontology

Topics

Major Works

  • Timaeus

    - Recommended translation: Timaeus, trans. Peter Kalkavage (Focus, 2001).
    Excerpt: Socrates One, two, three,—but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth of our guests of yesterday, our hosts of today? Timaeus Some sickness has befallen him, Socrates; for he would never have stayed away from our gathering of his own free will.… More

Other Works

  • Cratylus

    - Recommended translation: "Cratylus," trans. C. D. C. Reeve in Plato: Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper (Hackett, 1997).  
    Excerpt: Hermogenes Here is Socrates; shall we take him as a partner in our discussion? Cratylus If you like. Hermogenes Cratylus, whom you see here, Socrates, says that everything has a right name of its own, which comes by nature, and that a name is not… More

  • Philebus

    - Recommended translations:
    • The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato's Philebus, trans. Seth Benardete (University of Chicago Press: 1991).
    • "Philebus," trans. D. Frede in Plato: Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper (Hackett, 1997).
     
    Excerpt: Socrates Observe, then, Protarchus, what the doctrine is which you are now to accept from Philebus, and what our doctrine is, against which you are to argue, if you do not agree with it. Shall we make a brief statement of each of them? Protarchus By… More

Commentary

  • On Plato’s Timaeus and Timaeus’ Science Fiction

    - Benardete, Seth, "On Plato's Timaeus and Timaeus' Science Fiction," Interpretation 2, no. 1, (Summer 1971), 21-65.
    Excerpt: (17a1-b4). Socrates counts out loud. He makes himself out to be somewhat ridiculous. He does not say, “There are three of you; there should be four.” Nor does he say, We are all here except so-and-so. Where is he Timaeus?” Socrates… More

  • Physique et poesie dans le ‘Timee’ de Platon

    - Hadot, Pierre, "Physique et poesie dans le 'Timee' de Platon," Revue de theologie et de philosophie 115 (1983), 113-33.

  • Rumplestilskin’s Pleasures: True and False Pleasures in Plato’s Philebus

    - Frede, Dorothea, "Rumplestilskin’s Pleasures: True and False Pleasures in Plato's Philebus," Phronesis 30, no. 2 (1985), 151-80.
    Excerpt: Everyone who is moderately familiar with Plato’s dialogues will have the impression that pleasure according to Plato is a mixed blessing; often enough he refuses to regard it as a good – let alone the good – for mankind. It is easy to see… More

  • The Body of the Speech: A New Hypothesis on the Compositional Structure of Timaeus’ Monologue

    - Brague, Remi, "The Body of the Speech: A New Hypothesis on the Compositional Structure of Timaeus' Monologue," Platonic Investigations, ed. Dominic J. O'Meara, Catholic University of America Press, 1986.

  • On Pleasure and the Human Good: Plato’s Philebus

    - Cropsey, Joseph, "On Pleasure and the Human Good: Plato's Philebus," Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 16, no. 2 (Winter 1988-89), 167-93.
    Excerpt: Plato’s Philebus is said, under the encouragement of its subtitle, to be about pleasure; but how far it is from being simply about pleasure, or even primarily about pleasure, may be seen from the development of the argument toward and then… More

  • The Whole as Setting for Man: On Plato’s Timaeus

    - Cropsey, Joseph, "The Whole as Setting for Man: On Plato's Timaeus," Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 17, no. 2 (Winter 1989-90), 165-92.
    Excerpt: Plato’s Timaeus brings together Socrates and three of the four people who had requested, and received, on the preceding day, an account by him of his views on the polity. The review that Socrates gives “today” of the account that… More

  • The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato’s Philebus

    - Benardete, Seth, The Tragedy and Comedy of Life: Plato's Philebus, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
    Excerpt: The criticism of poetry in the Philebus does not deny to poetry its truthfulness to life. It locates its falsity in poetry’s denial of the goodness of life. Poetry’s exposition of life does not redeem it; rather, it makes life worth… More

  • Physics and Tragedy: On Plato’s Cratylus

    - Benardete, Seth, "Physics and Tragedy: On Plato's Cratylus," The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy, eds. Seth Benardete, Ronna Burger, and Michael Davis, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
    The Cratylus seems to be a caricature of a Platonic dialogue. It gives us Socrates as seen in the distorting mirror of an alien inspiration. It begins as a farce and ends as a tragedy: Socrates finally invokes the “ideas” like so many dei ex… More

  • Names and Nature in Plato’s Cratylus

    - Barney, Rachel, Names and Nature in Plato's Cratylus, New York: Routledge, 2001.
    Excerpt: The Cratylus is Plato’s most extended discussion of language—more precisely, of ‘the correctness of names’—and one of his most enigmatic dialogues. As such, it has attracted a daunting mass of interpretive debate, but there is… More

  • Time in the Timaeus

    - Brann, Eva, "Time in the Timaeus," The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates' Conversations and Plato's Writings, Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004, 273-77.
    Excerpt: In the dialogue named after him, Timaeus has the divine Craftsman, who is making the heavens, say: He thought of making a certain movable image of eternity, and, at once with ordering heaven, he made an eternal image going according to number, that… More

  • Plato and the Good: Illuminating the Darkling Vision

    - Desjardins, Rosemary, Plato and the Good: Illuminating the Darkling Vision, Boston, MA: Brill Publishers, 2004.
    Excerpt: Named for a young man whose contribution to the dialogue is largely significant silence, the Philebus explores the notion of good in the context of human life. But right away we run into difficulty. It turns out that, for the Greeks as for us, there… More

  • Timaeus-Critias: Completing or Challenging Socratic Political Philosophy?

    - Zuckert, Catherine H., "Timaeus-Critias: Completing or Challenging Socratic Political Philosophy?," Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 420-81.
    Excerpt: Socrates concluded his discussion of the city in speech, which he proposed in the Republic, by observing that it did not matter whether this city ever actually came into being, because it would serve as “a paradigm laid up in heaven for the… More

  • On the Timaeus

    - Benardete, Seth, "On the Timaeus," The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy, ed. Ronna Burger and Michael Davis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, 376-95.
    Excerpt: Thirty years ago, when I submitted a paper to Leo Strauss on Timaeus’s science fiction, he wrote back to say that Plato’s Timaeus for him had always been sealed with 77 seals, but he thought he saw two things clearly: Timaeus’s… More