Tag: The Good

Topics

Major Works

  • 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

  • Symposium

    - Recommended translations:
    • Plato. Plato’s Symposium: A Translation by Seth Benardete with Commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete. Translated by Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
    • Plato. "Symposium." Translated by A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by J. M. Cooper, 457–505. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997.
    An excerpt- Socrates’ recounting of Diotima’s teachings on the “Ladder of Love”: “He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward… 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

Other Works

  • Hipparchus

    - Recommended translations:
    • "Hipparchus," trans. Steven Forde in The Roots of Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Cornell, 1987).
    • "Hipparchus," trans. N. Smith in Plato: Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper (Hackett, 1997).
    Excerpt: Socrates And what is love of gain? What can it be, and who are the lovers of gain? Friend In my opinion, they are those who think it worth while to make gain out of things of no worth. Socrates Is it your opinion that they know those things to be of… More

  • Lesser Hippias

    - Recommended translations:
    • "Lesser Hippias," trans. J. Leake in The Roots of Political Philosophy, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Cornell, 1987).
    • "Lesser Hippias," trans. N. Smith in Plato: Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper (Hackett, 1997).
    Excerpt: Eudicus Why, then, are you silent, Socrates, when Hippias has been delivering such a fine display? Why do you not join us in praising some part of his speech, or else, if he seems to you to have been wrong in any point, refute him—especially now… 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

  • Plato: The Man and His Work

    - A. E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work, Dover Publications, 2011.  Originally published in 1926.
    From the publisher: This outstanding work by a renowned Plato scholar presents the thought of the great Greek philosopher with historical accuracy and objective analysis. A brief introductory chapter about the philosopher’s life is followed by an… 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Introduction to the Lesser Hippias

    - Leake, James, "Introduction to the Lesser Hippias," The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, ed. Thomas L. Pangle, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987, 300-06.
    Excerpt: The major interlocutor of Socrates in this dialogue is Hippias, one of the most renowned sophists at the end of the fifth century. His fellows citizens at Elis, the small city in the northwestern Peloponese, chose him on numerous occasions to… More

  • Plato

    - Strauss, Leo, "Plato," History of Political Philosophy, 3rd edition, eds. Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
    Excerpt: Thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters have come down to us as Platonic writings, not all of which are now regarded as genuine. Some scholars go so far as to doubt that any of the letters is genuine. In order not to encumber our presentation with… More

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • The Ladder of Love

    - Bloom, Allan, "The Ladder of Love," Plato's Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
    Excerpt: All of this amounts to nothing more than an abstraction, the improbable assertion that thinking is erotic, unless there is some real connection between the activity of thinking and the phenomena everyone recognizes as erotic. This paradoxical… More

  • On Plato’s Symposium

    - Benardete, Seth, "On Plato's Symposium," Plato's Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
    Excerpt: Some Platonic dialogues are bound closely to the life and times of Socrates, and some are set at a particular time of day. The Phaedo and Symposium satisfy both criteria; they are also non-Socratically reported dialogues, and both contain… 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 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 the Socratic Education: An Introduction to the Shorter Platonic Dialogues

    - Bruell, Christopher, On the Socratic Education: An Introduction to the Shorter Platonic Dialogues, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
    Excerpt: Nothing is so well established in our Western democracies today as the right of each to seek happiness in his or her own way. It is as if a pass to that effect had been issued to us at birth. This much is obvious. Less obvious is the fact that… More

  • Plato’s Symposium

    - Rosen, Stanley, Plato's Symposium, 3rd ed., South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 1999.
    Book description (from the publisher): This is the first full-length study of the Symposium to be published in English [originally published in 1967], and one of the first English works on Plato to take its bearings by the dramatic form of the Platonic… More

  • On Plato’s Symposium

    - Strauss, Leo, On Plato's Symposium, ed. Seth Benardete, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
    Excerpt: This course will be on Plato’s political philosophy and it will be conducted in the form of an explanation and an interpretation of the Symposium. by way of introduction I have to answer these two questions: (1) Why do we study Plato’s… More

  • The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of the Symposium

    - Nussbaum, Martha C., "The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of the Symposium," The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 165-195.
    Excerpt: He was, to begin with, beautiful. He was endowed with a physical grace and splendor that captivated the entire city. They did not decline as he grew, but flourished at each stage with new authority and power. He was always highly conscious of his… 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Making Something from Nothing: On Plato’s Hipparchus

    - Davis, Michael, "Making Something from Nothing: On Plato's Hipparchus," The Review of Politics 68 (2006), 547-63.
    Abstract: Plato’s Hipparchus is generally not taken particularly seriously; it is thought either spurious or negligible. Yet its theme, love of the good, places it at the summit of philosophy, at least as Socrates presents it in the Republic. Why,… 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

  • Socrates’ Positive Teaching

    - Zuckert, Catherine H., "Socrates' Positive Teaching," Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 281-419.
    Excerpt: In the Apology Socrates says that, in response to the oracle’s paradoxical pronouncement that there was no one wiser than he, he went first to question the politicians because they claimed to know what is good. But in the first conversations… 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

  • Plato’s “Laws”: A Critical Guide

    - Bobonich, Christopher, ed., Plato's Laws: A Critical Guide, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
    About the Book: Long understudied, Plato’s Laws has been the object of renewed attention in the past decade, and is now considered to be his major work of political philosophy besides the Republic. In his last dialogue, Plato returns to the project of… 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