Tag: Soul

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

  • 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

  • Phaedo

    - Recommended translations: Phaedo, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Hackett: 1977) Phaedo, trans. E. Brann (Focus, 1998)
    Excerpt: Echecrates Were you with Socrates yourself, Phaedo, on the day when he drank the poison in prison, or did you hear about it from someone else? Phaedo I was there myself, Echecrates. Echecrates Then what did he say before his death? and how did he… 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

  • Protagoras and Meno

    - Recommended translation: Plato: "Protagoras" and "Meno,"  trans. Robert C. Bartlett (Cornell, 2004).
    From the Publisher: This volume contains new translations of two dialogues of Plato, the Protagoras and the Meno, together with explanatory notes and substantial interpretive essays. Robert C. Bartlett’s translations are as literal as is compatible… More

Other Works

  • Alcibiades II

    - Recommended translations:
    • "Alcibiades II," trans. C. Lord in The Roots of Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Cornell, 1987).
    • "Alcibiades II," trans. A. Kenny in Plato: Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper (Hackett, 1997).
    • Socrates and Alcibiades: Four Texts, ed. David Johnson (Focus, 2003).
    Excerpt: Socrates Alcibiades, are you on your way to offer a prayer to the god? Alcibiades I am, certainly, Socrates. Socrates You seem, let me say, to have a gloomy look, and to keep your eyes on the ground, as though you were pondering something. Alcibiades… More

  • Charmides

    - Recommended Translations: "Charmides," trans. R. K. Sprague in Plato: Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper (Hackett, 1997). "Charmides," trans. Thomas and Grace West in Plato: Charmides. (Hackett, 1986).
    Excerpt: We arrived yesterday evening from the army at Potidaea, and I sought with delight, after an absence of some time, my wonted conversations. Accordingly I went into the wrestling-school of Taureas, opposite the Queen’s shrine, and there I came… More

Commentary

  • 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

  • A Commentary on Plato’s Meno

    - Klein, Jacob, A Commentary on Plato's Meno, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
    Excerpt: In the past, for long stretches of time, writing commentaries was a way of expounding the truth. It still may be that. But how about commentaries on Platonic dialogues? Must they not be based on a variety of preconceptions and predecisions, on a vast… 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 Final Proof of the Immortality of the Soul in Plato’s Phaedo

    - Frede, Dorothea, "The Final Proof of the Immortality of the Soul in Plato's Phaedo 102a – 107a," Phronesis, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1978), pp. 27-41.
    Excerpt: Among the arguments presented by Socrates as proofs for the everlastingness of the human soul the last one has greatly puzzled philosophers because it seems that, in opposition to the earlier arguments, Plato considered this last argument conclusive.

  • Plato and Nietzsche on Death

    - Davis, Michael, "Plato and Nietzsche on Death: An Introduction to Plato's Phaedo," Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 1 (1980), 69-80.
    Excerpt: The title of this paper is something of a lie. It is a noble lie, but it is a lie. Plato and Nietzsche will not be equally treated here. Still, the title reflects one of the crucial problems of contemporary philosophy, and of contemporary life. For… More

  • Socrates’ Pre-Socratism: Some Remarks on the Structure of Plato’s Phaedo

    - Davis, Michael, "Socrates' Pre-Socratism: Some Remarks on the Structure of Plato's Phaedo," Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 33, No. 3 (March 1980).
    Excerpt: To Speak of Socrates’ pre-Socraticism is puzzling. It suggests that there was a time at which Socrates was not Socrates. That is not entirely misleading. There was something special about Socrates, special enough so that Nietzsche, for one,… 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

  • The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth

    - Burger, Ronna, The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

  • 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.

  • The Life of Philosophy and the Immortality of the Soul

    - Bolotin, David, "The Life of Philosophy and the Immortality of the Soul: An Introduction to Plato's Phaedo," Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 7 (1987), 39-56.
    Excerpt: It is widely acknowledged that Plato’s dialogues are artistic wholes, in which the ‘content’, or the speeches of the various characters, is inseparable from the ‘form’, or the dramatic context within which these speeches… 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 Soul’s Silent Dialogue: A Non-Apporetic Reading of the Theaetetus

    - Frede, Dorothea, "The Soul's Silent Dialogue: A Non-Apporetic Reading of the Theaetetus," The Cambridge Classical Journal 35 (December 1989), 20-49.
    Excerpt: Our situation with respect to Plato is paradoxical. Here is a philosopher who emphatically insisted on truth and repudiated persuasion. And yet the community of Plato’s admirers finds itself in the predicament that persuasion (or plausibility)… 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

  • Socratic Rationalism and Political Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s Phaedo

    - Stern, Paul, Socratic Rationalism and Political Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato's Phaedo, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993.
    Excerpt: I undertake this study of the Phaedo in order to understand the rationalism of Plato’s Socrates. It is a striking feature of the contemporary intellectual situation that a study such as this can be of more than simply historical interest. But… 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

  • The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy

    - Ahrensdorf, Peter J., The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy, New York: State University of New York, 1995.
    Excerpt: While all of Plato’s dialogues celebrate the philosophic life as a whole and the life of Socrates in particular, none does so more dramatically or more movingly than the Phaedo. There we see the philosopher face death with a nobility which all… More

  • Phaedo

    - Cropsey, Joseph, "Phaedo," Plato's World: Man's Place in the Cosmos, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
    Excerpt: Phaedo, so important by reason of its substance and occasion, receives its name from a historical figure about whom little can now be said to be known. Litle enough was remembered of him in later antiquity when Diogenes Laertius wrote his paragraph… 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

  • On Plato’s Phaedo

    - Benardete, Seth, "On Plato's Phaedo," The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy, eds. Ronna Burger and Michael Davis, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
    Excerpt: I wish to discuss four things in Plato’s Phaedo. First, the intention of the dialogue as a whole; second, the plan or structure of the Phaedo, third, some arguments of the Phaedo, and fourth, the reason for the structure of the dialogue.

  • 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

  • Introduction to the Phaedo

    - Brann, Eva, "Introduction to the Phaedo" and "Socrates' Legacy: Plato's Phaedo," The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates' Conversations and Plato's Writings, Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2004.
    Excerpt: In the first book of his Inquiries, Herodotus tells the story of Solon and Croesus. The Athenian wise man gives the Lydian tyrant a piece of advice. “Look to the end,” he says, if you want to know whether a human life has really been… 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

  • Imitative Poetry: Book X of the Republic

    - Brann, Eva, "Imitative Poetry: Book X of the Republic," The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates' Conversations and Plato's Writings, Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004, 256-72.
    Excerpt: A mindful reader of the grand finale of Plato’s Republic, the myth of the soul’s fore- and afterlife in the cosmos, might well feel scandalized. Twice in the work Socrates has inveighed against myth-making and vision-inducing poetry.… More

  • The Music of the Republic by Eva Brann

    - Brann, Eva. “The Music of the Republic.” In The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates' Conversations and Plato's Writings, 108–245. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004.
    Eva Brann’s The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and Plato’s Writings offers a rigorous and insightful examination of Plato’s dialogues, providing a valuable resource for engaging with Socratic thought. Brann, a… 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

Multimedia

  • Les luttes intérieures de l’âme dans le Phèdre de Platon

    - Jacqueline de Romilly, "Les luttes intérieures de l'âme dans le Phèdre de Platon," Collège de France, 1981.
    Jacqueline de Romilly, the renowed French scholar of Ancient Greek writers (particularly Thucydides), discusses the Phaedrus of Plato in this INF (French national television) clip from 1981.

  • Miles Burnyeat on Plato

    - "On Plato," The Great Philosophers, BBC, 1987.
    About the program: The dialogues of Plato are analyzed in this episode of the BBC series The Great Philosophers (1987), in which Bryan Magee interviews Cambridge philosophy professor Miles Burnyeat. Seeing Plato’s ideas initially as extensions of… More

  • 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