Tag: Philosophy and the City

Topics

Major Works

  • Apology

    - Recommended translation: Plato. "Apology." In Four Texts on Socrates, translated by Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West, 1–33. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984; revised edition, 1998.
    Excerpt from Plato’s Apology: “How you, men of Athens, have been affected by my accusers, I do not know; but I, for my part, almost forgot my own identity, so persuasively did they talk; and yet there is hardly a word of truth in what they have… More

  • Laws

    - Recommended translation: The Laws of Plato, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Basic, 1980; University of Chicago Press, 1988).
    This is the best edition of the Laws available in English. Thomas L. Pangle’s edition also includes an extended interpretative essay that introduces the work. Excerpt: Athenian To whom do you ascribe the authorship of your legal arrangements, Strangers?… More

  • Statesman

    - Recommended translation: "Statesman" in The Being of the Beautiful: Plato's Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman,  trans. Seth Benardete (University of Chicago Press: 1984).
    Excerpt: Socrates Really I am greatly indebted to you, Theodorus, for my acquaintance with Theaetetus and with the Stranger, too. Theodorus Presently, Socrates, you will be three times as much indebted, when they have worked out the statesman and the… More

  • Republic

    - Recommended translations:
    • Plato. The Republic of Plato. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1968.
    • Plato. The Republic. Translated by Tom Griffith. Edited by G. R. F. Ferrari. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
    Excerpt: “What you say is very fine indeed, Cephalus,” I said. “But as to this very thing, justice, shall we so simply assert that it is the truth and giving back what a man has taken from another, or is to do these very things sometimes just and… More

Commentary

  • Farabi’s Plato

    - Strauss, Leo, "Farabi's Plato," Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945.  Reprinted, revised and abbreviated, in Persecution and the Art of Writing.
    Excerpt: Farabi followed Plato not merely as regards the manner in which he presented the philosophic teaching in his most important books.  He held the view that Plato’s philosophy was the true philosophy.  To reconcile his Platonism with his… More

  • How Farabi Read Plato’s Laws

    - Strauss, Leo, "How Farabi Read Plato's Laws," Mélanges Louis Massignon, Institut Francais de Damas, 1957, Vol. 3.  Reprinted in What Is Political Philosophy?
    Excerpt: At first it seems as if Farabi meant to say that all insights which he ascribed to Plato were peculiar to Plato. What he actually says however is that Plato did not find the science which he desired among the sciences and arts which are known to the… More

  • On Plato’s Republic

    - Strauss, Leo, "On Plato's Republic," The City and Man, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964, 50-138.
    Excerpt: Generally speaking, we can know the thought of a man only through his speeches oral or written. We can know Aristotle’s political philosophy through his Politics. Plato’s Republic on the other hand, in contradistinction to… More

  • The Republic of Plato

    - Bloom, Allan, The Republic of Plato, New York: Basic Books, 1968, 1991.
    Excerpt: The Republic is the true Apology of Socrates, for only in the Republic does he give an adequate treatment of the theme which was forced on him by Athens’ accusation against him. That theme is the relationship of the philosopher to the… More

  • The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws

    - Strauss, Leo, The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
    Excerpt: In the traditional order of the Platonic dialogues the Laws is preceded by the Minos, the only Platonic dialogue in which Socrates raises the question What is law? It appears that not all laws are good or, at any rate equally good. The Cretan laws… More

  • The Political Psychology of Religion in Plato’s Laws

    - Pangle, Thomas L., "The Political Psychology of Religion in Plato’s Laws," The American Political Science Review 70, no. 4 (December 1976), 1059-77.
    Excerpt: Why is it important that we turn our serious attention to Plato’s Laws? How will the study of this antique work help us to come to grips with the dilemma of modern democracy? We find ourselves citizens of rich and powerful regimes which… More

  • An Introduction to Plato’s Republic

    - Annas, Julia, An Introduction to Plato's Republic, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
    Excerpt: The Republic is Plato’s best-known work, and there are ways in which it is too famous for its own good. It gives us systematic answers to a whole range of questions about morality, politics, knowledge, and metaphysics, and the book is written… More

  • On Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito by Leo Strauss

    - Strauss, Leo. “On Plato's Apology of Socrates and Crito.” In Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, 68–97. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.
    From the publisher: “One of the outstanding thinkers of our time offers in this book his final words to posterity. Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy was well underway at the time of Leo Strauss’s death in 1973. Having chosen the title for the… More

  • Science, Faith, and Politics

    - Weinberger, Jerry, "Preface," Science, Faith, and Politics: Francis Bacon and the Utopian Roots of the Modern Age: A Commentary on Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.

  • Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic

    - Benardete, Seth, Socrates' Second Sailing: On Plato's Republic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
    Excerpt: The title of this book alludes to the phrase Plato has Socrates use in his intellectual autobiography in the Phaedo. Socrates tells his story as a preface to his reply to Cebes’ counterargument to the proof Socrates has given about the… More

  • Legislation and Demiurgy: On the Relationship Between Plato’s Republic and Laws

    - Laks, Andre, "Legislation and Demiurgy: On the Relationship Between Plato’s Republic and Laws," Classical Antiquity 9, no. 2 (Oct. 1990), 209-29.
    Excerpt: Glenn Morrow, who did so much to illuminate the historical background of the Laws in his book Plato’s Cretan City, also had a sense, one quite unusual among commentators, of how the Laws really belonged to Plato’s philosophy and was… More

  • On Plato’s Political Philosophy

    - Bruell, Christopher, "On Plato's Political Philosophy," The Review of Politics 56, no. 2 (Spring 1994), 261-82.
    Abstract: This article consists chiefly in an examination of the Republic, but that examination attempts to determine the place of the Republic in relation to Plato’s other works (especially the Laws and the Statesman) as well as their place in… More

  • Plato’s Statesman by Stanley Rosen

    - Rosen, Stanley, Plato's Statesman: Web of Politics, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
    Excerpt: “The Statesman, like Plato’s earlier Sophist, features a Stranger who tries to refute Socrates. Much of his conversation is devoted to a minute analysis of the art of weaving, selected by the Stranger as a paradigm of the royal art of… More

  • Statesman

    - Cropsey, Joseph, "Statesman," Plato's World: Man's Place in the Cosmos, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 111-44.
    Excerpt: The Stranger begins his colloquy with Young Socrates by proposing to seek out the statesman and to do so by identifying the statesman’s peculiar “science” or knowledge (episteme). If one knows what the statesman singularly knows,… More

  • The Problem of Socrates

    - Strauss, Leo, "The Problem of Socrates," Interpretation 22, no. 2 (Spring 1995).  Talk given on April 17, 1970, at St. John's College, Annapolis.
    Excerpt: [I was told that the local paper has announced that I lecture tonight on “The problems of Socrates.” This was an engaging printing error; for there is more than one problem of Socrates, in the first place, the problem with which Socrates… More

  • Apology of Socrates

    - Cropsey, Joseph, "Apology of Socrates," Plato's World: Man's Place in the Cosmos, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
    Excerpt: There are at least three principles on which the Dialogues of Plato, or some of them, can be arranged to form a general schema. The first to be employed was the ancient grouping of the dialogues in the famous tetralogies according to their perceived… More

  • Plato’s Republic: Critical Essays

    - Kraut, Richard, ed., Plato's Republic: Critical Essays, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
    Excerpt: Plato (427-347 B.C.) is the first Western philosopher who wrote systematically about the wide range of questions that make up the subject of philosophy, and it is in the Republic that he most fully expresses his conception of what philosophy is and… More

  • Inside and Outside the Republic

    - Lear, Jonathan, "Inside and Outside the Republic," Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, 219-46.
    Excerpt: An engaged reader of the Republic must at some point wonder how—or if—it all fits together. There seems to be jumbled within that text a challenge to conventional justice, a political theory, a psychology, a metaphysics, a theory of education,… More

  • Plato’s Doctrine of Truth

    - Heidegger, Martin, "Plato's Doctrine of Truth," trans. Thomas Sheehan, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 155-82.
    Whatever one makes of Heidegger’s own views, or his criticism of Plato and what he calls the Platonic tradition, this essay offers a profound meditation on Plato’s Cave and Plato’s “doctrine” of truth. Excerpt: The knowledge that… More

  • The Plan of Plato’s Statesman

    - Benardete, Seth, "The Plan of Plato’s Statesman," The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, 354-75.
    Excerpt: One one realizes that the unemployed king could be the wise man in charge of himself, it is possible to reinterpret the Stranger’s fourth piece of evidence that politics is a gnostic science. He says that the king’s hands and body… More

  • Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s Republic

    - Baracchi, Claudia, Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato's Republic, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
    Excerpt: Yet another work on Plato, on that most universally recognized among the Platonic dialogues—the Republic. The Republic of Plato (so we call it, today, in this part of the world): a seminal text, inaugurating an epoch of which we are still… More

  • Why Justice? The Answer of the Republic

    - Brann, Eva, "Why Justice? The Answer of the Republic," The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates' Conversations and Plato's Writings, Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004, 246-55.
    Excerpt: In literature as in life, justice is taken to be something good, and there are two questions about “good” that are hard to ask. The harder one is “Why is good better than bad?” When Stan leaps over the wall into Milton’s… More

  • Introduction to Reading the Republic

    - Brann, Eva, "Introduction to Reading the Republic," The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates' Conversations and Plato's Writings, Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004, 88-107.
    Excerpt: The Republic is a dialogue, that is to say, a conversation. Since it is a conversation recorded between the covers of a book we cannot help but begin by reading it, but I think the author wants us as soon as possible to join it, to be converted… More

  • The Philosopher in Plato’s Statesman

    - Miller, Mitchell, The Philosopher in Plato's Statesman, Las Vegas, NV: Parmenidies Publishing, 2004.
    Excerpt: In contemporary writings on Plato it is almost commonplace to remark that he is at once a profound philosopher and dramatist and teacher. Even by its form, however, this remark may confess more about contemporary scholarship and higher education… More

  • City and Soul in Plato’s Republic

    - Ferrari, G. R. F., City and Soul in Plato's Republic, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
    Excerpt: In this short book I attempt to say what Plato is getting at in the Republic. That is a grand ambition for a slim volume. My strategy has been to trace one bright thread, the comparison between the structure of a society and that of the individual… More

  • Plato’s Republic: A Study

    - Rosen, Stanley, Plato's Republic: A Study, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
    Excerpt: Plato’s Republic is one of those works in the history of philosophy that is both excessively familiar and inexhaustibly mysterious. It has been studied endlessly by a wide range of readers, specialists and amateurs alike, and has become a… More

  • Metaphysics and Method in Plato’s Statesman

    - Sayre, Kenneth M., Metaphysics and Method in Plato's Statesman, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
    Excerpt: The Statesman begins with Socrates thanking Theodorus for introducing him to Theaetetus and the Stranger from Elea. After a bantering interchange on the relative values of sophistry, statesmanship, and philosophy, and after acquiescing to the… More

  • Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic

    - Reeve, C. D. C., Philosopher Kings: The Argument of Plato's Republic, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006.
    Excerpt: Book I of the Republic differs markedly in philosophical style from its fellows. In it we find Socrates questioning all and sundry about what justice is, using the elenchus to refute them, and refusing to provide any positive answers of his own.… More

  • The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s Republic

    - Ferrari, G. R. F., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
    Excerpt: When is it that we choose to journey with companions? Most often, I suppose, when we want to make the journey fuller, more pleasant, more vivid. But we may also want a fellow traveler to point out landmarks we might be missing or perhaps to assure us… More

  • What Can We Learn from Political Theory?

    - Strauss, Leo, "What Can We Learn from Political Theory?" Review of Politics 69, no. 4 (Fall 2007).  Talk given in July 1942 at the New School for Social Research.
    Excerpt: The title of this lecture is not entirely of my own choosing. I do not like very much the term political theory; I would prefer to speak of political philosophy. Since this terminological question is not entirely verbal, I beg leave to say a few… More

  • The Trial and Death of Socrates

    - Zuckert, Catherine H., "The Trial and Death of Socrates," Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
    Excerpt: Alfred North Whitehead’s quip that all subsequent philosophy is merely a footnote to Plato has often been repeated, but those who repeat it do not seem to have thought much about the difference between the source and the scholarship on it.… More

  • The Ironic Defense of Socrates: Plato’s Apology

    - Leibowitz, David M., The Ironic Defense of Socrates: Plato's Apology, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
    Excerpt: Thirty-five Platonic dialogues have come down to us as genuine. Socrates is present in at least thirty-three and the chief speaker in at least twenty-seven. Yet he is mentioned in a title only this once. Plato’s Socrates first comes to sigh,… More

  • Virtue and Politics: The Laws

    - Blitz, Mark, "Virtue and Politics: The Laws," Plato's Political Philosophy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 82-114.
    Excerpt: We pursue our study of virtue by considering more fully Plato’s understanding of its place in politics. His thematic discussion of politics occurs in three dialogues, the Laws, the Republic, and the Statesman. As we have seen, moreover,… More

  • Knowledge and Politics: The Statesman

    - Blitz, Mark, "Knowledge and Politics: The Statesman," Plato's Political Philosophy, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 241-68.
    Excerpt: The Stranger and young Socrates begin to search for the statesman by agreeing that he is characterized by knowledge or art. What, then, defines his art as opposed to other arts? They first divide all knowledge into practical and cognitive science,… More

  • Philosophy and Politics: The Republic

    - Blitz, Mark, "Philosophy and Politics: The Republic," Plato's Political Philosophy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, 166-90.
    Excerpt: We have now discussed several experiences that are at the root of philosophy, and a phenomenon, beauty, that helps to define both ethical and intellectual virtue. It is therefore reasonable to turn next to Plato’s Republic. For, beyond any… More

  • Divine Law and Political Philosophy in Plato’s Laws

    - Lutz, Mark J., Divine Law and Political Philosophy in Plato’s Laws, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2012.
    About the Book: All over the world secular rationalist governments and judicial authorities have been challenged by increasingly forceful claims made on behalf of divine law. For those who believe that reason—not faith—should be the basis of politics and… More

  • Eidos and Diaeresis in Plato’s Statesman

    - Benardete, Seth, "Eidos and Diaeresis in Plato's Statesman," The Archaeology of the Soul: Platonic Readings in Ancient Poetry and Philosophy, ed. Ronna Burger and Michael Davis, St. Augustine Press, 2012.

Multimedia

  • Leo Strauss Courses on Plato

    - Audio of courses taught by Leo Strauss, 1958 - 1973, provided by the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago.
    Courses include: Plato’s Laws, Symposium, Gorgias, Meno, Apology/Crito, Protagoras, Euthydemus and Republic.

  • Allan Bloom on Plato’s Apology of Socrates

    - Audio recording of Allan Bloom teaching a seminar on Plato's Apology. 9 minutes 49 seconds.

  • David Roochnik on Plato’s Republic

    - Roochnik, David, "Plato's Republic," Audio downloads, The Great Courses, 24 lectures.
    Course description: It is the first work in the history of Western political philosophy and, arguably, the most influential—so influential that the entire European philosophical tradition has been described as being nothing more than a “series of… More