The second half of this dialogue, where Zeno discusses an example with another young man, is incomprehensible. Seriously, people have been trying to figure it out for millennia, and there is still no agreement on what is going on.
So take heart that you are not the first person to be confused by the Parmenides. Philebus: On the surface, this is just a straight-forward argument about which is better — pleasure or wisdom. Groundbreaking, I know. The dialogue is actually more interesting for how it reaches the conclusions it does, with some further elaboration on the World of Forms and other Big Issues.
Sophist: Socrates actually takes a back seat in this one, as the main character is the Eleaic Stranger. Ostensibly about how to properly classify a Sophist, the piece features heavy use of division categorisation, and makes some further elaboration on the World of Forms.
Statesman: A follow-up to the Sophist, this was actually the second part of an incomplete trilogy the unwritten third dialogue was to be the Philosopher. The Statesman is about defining Statesmanship… and is a good deal more grounded in its political ideas than the Republic.
Sure, Plato thinks the Philosopher King is the best… but a written law is second best. The dialogue also features some interesting myths, including a world where men age backwards. Timaeus: As a curiosity, this was actually considered the most important Platonic dialogue in the medieval era, primarily because the first half translated into Latin was the only Plato directly available in Medieval Europe. The Timaeus, part acid trip, part dry science textbook, is Plato engaging with natural philosophy, and it is profoundly odd.
The stuff contained here is the basis of Neoplatonic mysticism, and along with the Critias, this dialogue is also the foundation of the Atlantis myth. Meanwhile, Plato believed in reincarnation, with good people ending up on appropriate stars. Bad people end up as women. Critias: An unfinished follow-up to the Timaeus, the Critias is Atlantis world-building notes. There was also apparently to be a third instalment in this trilogy, the Hermocrates, but Plato never wrote it.
Minos: A dubious dialogue that traditionally functioned as a preamble to the Laws, the Minos is seen as an early attempt at exploring legal philosophy. Legal ideas have advanced a bit since, and I am sure that most people would be sceptical of the notion that the best legal framework is the one that has endured the longest.
Laws: Ugh. The Laws. Long gone is the utopian dream of the Republic, here replaced with the mundane minutiae of planning a Cretan colony. Taken as a whole? In terms of the wider corpus, think of a lonely old man, sitting on a graveyard bench in late autumn, as dry leaves scatter around him.
The old man dwells on the failures of his life. That is the Laws. Actually worth reading if you are interested in the more mystical side of Platonism. Definitions : Not a dialogue, but a list of … definitions. Cue Diogenes and his plucked chicken. There are thirteen of them, some of them more authentic than others everyone agrees the First one is a fake, but the others are up for debate.
The longest and most important one is the Seventh Letter , which I would recommend reading first, since it provides some useful biographical and contextual information for the others. The Platonic corpus and apocrypha. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Search for:.
There were people who read him as a full-blown idealist. Then there were people who read him as a sceptic, because some of the dialogues end in aporia, in unresolved puzzles. The sceptical Plato and the political Plato also have roots in Nietzsche. This idea that Plato was writing to have an impact in politics through his writing is something that Nietzsche was very interested in. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce.
If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. Within the Republic itself there are different frames that are very interesting. The three of them constitute themselves as legislators for a city in speech. We have to have some relationship to it and to take a role in relation to it. Not just the mind, but the soul. This is a big debate. Then that becomes the key question.
How can we show whether the happiest life is going to be the just life or the unjust life? The arc of the dialogue then is, what does thinking about these cities tell us about the soul? What Eric Havelock is interested in is the state of culture in Greece before Plato. Yet it made a huge impression on me when I read it because what he argues is that you have to appreciate the depths of the role of oral culture in Mediterranean societies, and in Greek and Athenian society. People, rhapsodes, memorised them, and they passed it down orally.
What we find in Plato, explicitly, is tremendous anxiety and concern about the nature of writing. Those are the questions that Plato was asking in his own time about writing. This book argues that money is this very new technology at that moment. I know very little about it, can you tell me why you chose it?
This was the subject of my PhD thesis and my first book. Often people say Plato has three great political dialogues, the Republic , the Statesman and the Laws. One problem with saying that is that you might say all his dialogues have a political dimension. So even if you say, OK, these are the three dialogues that explicitly treat the nature of politics and constitutions, the Republic and the Laws look much more similar.
The Statesman looks very different from that. What the Statesman is doing is asking, Is there such a thing as political expertise or political knowledge? What is it exactly that a true statesman would have to know? What would it therefore be, to be someone who knows about politics, as opposed to just knowing philosophy?
If somebody were to approach this book for the first time, should they read it from cover to cover, or are there key passages that you should focus in on? At the end of the dialogue, that knowledge-cum-skill is illustrated by trying to moderate between hawks and doves.
There are people who are too bellicose and hawkish on war and people who are too dove-ish and want peace, sometimes at the wrong moment. The statesman will be able to set up shared opinions beliefs and values and even marriages between these two groups that will moderate their views and enable them to better perceive the right moment for political action. These are being a general, being a judge and being an orator. Those were the offices that were thought of as the political offices in Greek cities at the time.
Something like that. OUP Philosophy publishes cutting-edge scholarship across the discipline in a range of online and print resources. Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Press handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities.
We will only use your personal information to register you for OUPblog articles. Or subscribe to articles in the subject area by email or RSS. Jeesh—7 of the 11 modern philosophers are British. Continent Isolated. Please do better to consider more of the world in the future. OUP Philosophy The OUP Philosophy list boasts cutting-edge scholarship including monographs handbooks and textbooks - suitable for graduate and undergraduate use, as well as journals articles, online articles, and a collection of scholarly editions.
Read More. The Republic by Plato B. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes — Hobbes was one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Treatise of Government by John Locke Locke helped to establish the first fully formed, secular theory of human rights with his work, Treatise of Government The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith Smith was an eminent Scottish moral philosopher and the founder of modern economics, best-known for his book The Wealth of Nations which was highly influential in the development of Western capitalism.
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill John Stuart Mill was one of the most influential philosophers of the nineteenth-century and an advocate of utilitarianism, a theory based on the works of Jeremy Bentham. The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault — Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, and theorist. Subscribe to the OUPblog via email: Our Privacy Policy sets out how Oxford University Press handles your personal information, and your rights to object to your personal information being used for marketing to you or being processed as part of our business activities.
Recent Comments. Robert R. Calder 15 th November
0コメント