This book consists of Gregory Vlastos' studies on a variety of themes in Plato's metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy. Although many of the essays have appeared in various philosophical and classical journals or symposia, new in the volume are two major studies. One is on Plato's theory of love, exploring its metaphysical dimension and its far-reaching implications for personal and political relations. The other centers on semantic and logical problems in the Sophist; it offers solutions to crucial difficulties in this fundamental Platonic work. In these essays the author presents ideas which are likely to provoke comment and may be discussed as vigorously in scholarly journals as has some of his earlier work. The other papers, some of them extensively revised, comprise virtually all the author's published work on Plato, with the exception of a few papers easily accessible elsewhere. This second edition includes three additional essays and extensive notes that were not included in the original edition.

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 book, he selected the most important writings of his later years and arranged them to clarify the issues in political philosophy that occupied his attention throughout his life. As his choice of title indicates, the heart of Strauss's work is Platonism—a Platonism that is altogether unorthodox and highly controversial. These essays consider, among others, Heidegger, Husserl, Nietzsche, Marx, Moses Maimonides, Machiavelli, and of course Plato himself to test the Platonic understanding of the conflict between philosophy and political society. Strauss argues that an awesome spritual impoverishment has engulfed modernity because of our dimming awareness of that conflict. Thomas Pangle's Introduction places the work within the context of the entire Straussian corpus and focuses especially on Strauss's late Socratic writings as a key to his mature thought. For those already familiar with Strauss, Pangle's essay will provoke thought and debate; for beginning readers of Strauss, it provides a fine introduction. A complete bibliography of Strauss's writings if included.

Julia Annas here offers a fundamental reexamination of Plato's ethical thought by investigating the Middle Platonist perspective, which emerged at the end of Plato's own school, the Academy. She highlights the differences between ancient and modern assumptions about Plato's ethics--and stresses the need to be more critical about our own. One of these modern assumptions is the notion that the dialogues record the development of Plato's thought. Annas shows how the Middle Platonists, by contrast, viewed the dialogues as multiple presentations of a single Platonic ethical philosophy, differing in form and purpose but ultimately coherent. They also read Plato's ethics as consistently defending the view that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and see it as converging in its main points with the ethics of the Stoics. Annas goes on to explore the Platonic idea that humankind's final end is "becoming like God"--an idea that is well known among the ancients but virtually ignored in modern interpretations. She also maintains that modern interpretations, beginning in the nineteenth century, have placed undue emphasis on the Republic, and have treated it too much as a political work, whereas the ancients rightly saw it as a continuation of Plato's ethical writings.

These essays examine a crucial premise of traditional readings of Plato's dialogues: that Plato's own philosophical dialogues can be read off the statements made in the dialogues by Socrates and other leading characters. The text argues that no character should be read as Plato's mouthpiece.

This book consists of Gregory Vlastos' studies on a variety of themes in Plato's metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy. Although many of the essays have appeared in various philosophical and classical journals or symposia, new in the volume are two major studies. One is on Plato's theory of love, exploring its metaphysical dimension and its far-reaching implications for personal and political relations. The other centers on semantic and logical problems in the Sophist; it offers solutions to crucial difficulties in this fundamental Platonic work. In these essays the author presents ideas which are likely to provoke comment and may be discussed as vigorously in scholarly journals as has some of his earlier work. The other papers, some of them extensively revised, comprise virtually all the author's published work on Plato, with the exception of a few papers easily accessible elsewhere. This second edition includes three additional essays and extensive notes that were not included in the original edition.

The author approaches Plato's dialogues as live discussions in which the concrete concerns of the participants define the horizons of discourse. He takes up such perplexing problems of Plato's though as the role of poetry in the state and the theory of ideal numbers and brings to them a fresh understanding. With its emphasis on the dialogue form and the dramatic situation, this work complements the main tendencies of the analytical tradition which dominates contemporary Anglo-Saxon writing on Plato.