An exercise in the careful reading of the dialogues in their originary character. “Being and Logos is . . . a philosophical adventure of rare inspiration . . . Its power to illuminate the text . . . its ecumenicity of inspiration, its methodological rigor, its originality, and its philosophical profundity—all together make it one of the few philosophical interpretations that the philosopher will want to re-read along with the dialogues themselves. A superadded gift is the author’s prose, which is a model of lucidity and grace.” —International Philosophical Quarterly “Being and Logos is highly recommended for those who wish to learn how a thoughtful scholar approaches Platonic dialogues as well as for those who wish to consider a serious discussion of some basic themes in the dialogues.” —The Academic Reviewer

Reading Plato offers a concise and illuminating insight into the complexities and difficulties of the Platonic dialogues, providing an invaluable text for any student of Plato's philosophy. Taking as a starting point the critique of writing in the Phaedrus -- where Socrates argues that a book cannot choose its reader nor can it defend itself against misinterpretation -- Reading Plato offers solutions to the problems of interpreting the dialogues. In this ground-breaking book, Thomas A. Szlezak persuasively argues that the dialogues are designed to stimulate philosophical enquiry and to elevate philosophy to the realm of oral dialectic.

Faced with the difficult task of discerning Plato’s true ideas from the contradictory voices he used to express them, scholars have never fully made sense of the many incompatibilities within and between the dialogues. In the magisterial Plato’s Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert explains for the first time how these prose dramas cohere to reveal a comprehensive Platonic understanding of philosophy. To expose this coherence, Zuckert examines the dialogues not in their supposed order of composition but according to the dramatic order in which Plato indicates they took place. This unconventional arrangement lays bare a narrative of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. In the drama’s earliest dialogues, for example, non-Socratic philosophers introduce the political and philosophical problems to which Socrates tries to respond. A second dramatic group shows how Socrates develops his distinctive philosophical style. And, finally, the later dialogues feature interlocutors who reveal his philosophy’s limitations. Despite these limitations, Zuckert concludes, Plato made Socrates the dialogues’ central figure because Socrates raises the fundamental human question: what is the best way to live? Plato’s dramatization of Socratic imperfections suggests, moreover, that he recognized the apparently unbridgeable gap between our understandings of human life and the nonhuman world. At a time when this gap continues to raise questions—about the division between sciences and the humanities and the potentially dehumanizing effects of scientific progress—Zuckert’s brilliant interpretation of the entire Platonic corpus offers genuinely new insights into worlds past and present.

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.

This book explains how to read Plato, emphasizing the philosophic importance of the dramatic aspects of the dialogues, and showing that Plato is an ironic thinker and that his irony is deeply rooted in his philosophy.

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.