The Other Plato
The Other Plato

Author: Dmitri Nikulin

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-12-11

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1438444117

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Offering a provocative alternative to the dominant approaches of Plato scholarship, the Tübingen School suggests that the dialogues do not tell the full story of Plato's philosophical teachings. Texts and fragments by his students and their followers—most famously Aristotle's Physics—point to an "unwritten doctrine" articulated by Plato at the Academy. These unwritten teachings had a more systematic character than those presented in the dialogues, which according to this interpretation were meant to be introductory. The Tübingen School reconstructs a historical, critical, and systematic account of Plato that takes into account testimony about these teachings as well as the dialogues themselves. The Other Plato collects seminal and more recent essays by leading proponents of this approach, providing a comprehensive overview of the Tübingen School for English readers.

Plato's Parmenides
Plato's Parmenides

Author: Samuel Scolnicov

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-07-08

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0520925114

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Of all Plato’s dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents an illuminating new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology. Scolnicov shows that in the Parmenides Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In Scolnicov's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues. Scolnicov’s analysis is crisp and lucid, offering a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how Scolnicov’s interpretation emerges from the text. This volume will provide a valuable introduction and framework for understanding a dialogue that continues to generate lively discussion today.

The Republic
The Republic

Author: By Plato

Publisher: BookRix

Published: 2019-06-15

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 3736801467

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The Republic is a Socratic dialogue, written by Plato around 380 BCE, concerning the definition of justice, the order and character of the just city-state and the just man. The dramatic date of the dialogue has been much debated and though it must take place some time during the Peloponnesian War, "there would be jarring anachronisms if any of the candidate specific dates between 432 and 404 were assigned". It is Plato's best-known work and has proven to be one of the most intellectually and historically influential works of philosophy and political theory. In it, Socrates along with various Athenians and foreigners discuss the meaning of justice and examine whether or not the just man is happier than the unjust man by considering a series of different cities coming into existence "in speech", culminating in a city (Kallipolis) ruled by philosopher-kings; and by examining the nature of existing regimes. The participants also discuss the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the roles of the philosopher and of poetry in society.

Plato's Philosophers
Plato's Philosophers

Author: Catherine H. Zuckert

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2009-08-01

Total Pages: 898

ISBN-13: 0226993388

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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.

Plato and Nietzsche
Plato and Nietzsche

Author: Mark Anderson

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2014-08-28

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1472532899

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It is commonly known that Nietzsche is one of Plato's primary philosophical antagonists, yet there is no full-length treatment in English of their ideas in dialogue and debate. Plato and Nietzsche is an advanced introduction to these two thinkers, with original insights and arguments interspersed throughout the text. Through a rigorous exploration of their ideas on art, metaphysics, ethics, and the nature of philosophy, and by explaining and analyzing each man's distinctive approach, Mark Anderson demonstrates the many and varied ways they play off against one another. This book provides the background necessary to understanding the principle matters at issue between these two philosophers and to developing an awareness that Nietzsche's engagement with Plato is deeper and more nuanced than it is often presented as being.

Plato's Rivalry with Medicine
Plato's Rivalry with Medicine

Author: Susan B. Levin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-07-28

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 019991981X

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While scholars typically view Plato's engagement with medicine as uniform and largely positive, Susan B. Levin argues that from the Gorgias through the Laws, his handling of medicine unfolds in several key phases. Further, she shows that Plato views medicine as an important rival for authority on phusis (nature) and eudaimonia (flourishing). Levin's arguments rest on careful attention both to Plato and to the Hippocratic Corpus. Levin shows that an evident but unexpressed tension involving medicine's status emerges in the Gorgias and is explored in Plato's critiques of medicine in the Symposium and Republic. In the Laws, however, this rivalry and tension dissolve. Levin addresses the question of why Plato's rivalry with medicine is put to rest while those with rhetoric and poetry continue. On her account, developments in his views of human nature, with their resulting impact on his political thought, drive Plato's striking adjustments involving medicine in the Laws. Levin's investigation of Plato is timely: for the first time in the history of bioethics, the value of ancient philosophy is receiving notable attention. Most discussions focus on Aristotle's concept of phronêsis (practical wisdom); here, Levin argues that Plato has much to offer bioethics as it works to address pressing concerns about the doctor-patient tie, medical professionalism, and medicine's relationship to society.

Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life
Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life

Author: Daniel Russell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2005-09-15

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 0199282846

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Daniel Russell examines Plato's subtle and insightful analysis of pleasure and explores its intimate connections with his discussions of value and human psychology. Russell offers a fresh perspective on how good things bear on happiness in Plato's ethics, and shows that, for Plato, pleasure cannot determine happiness because pleasure lacks a direction of its own. Plato presents wisdom as a skill of living that determines happiness by directing one's life as a whole, bringing aboutgoodness in all areas of one's life, as a skill brings about order in its materials. The 'materials' of the skill of living are, in the first instance, not things like money or health, but one's attitudes, emotions, and desires where things like money and health are concerned. Plato recognizes thatthese 'materials' of the psyche are inchoate, ethically speaking, and in need of direction from wisdom. Among them is pleasure, which Plato treats not as a sensation but as an attitude with which one ascribes value to its object. However, Plato also views pleasure, once shaped and directed by wisdom, as a crucial part of a virtuous character as a whole. Consequently, Plato rejects all forms of hedonism, which allows happiness to be determined by a part of the psyche that does not direct one'slife but is among the materials to be directed. At the same time, Plato is also able to hold both that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and that pleasure is necessary for happiness, not as an addition to one's virtue, but as a constituent of one's whole virtuous character itself. Plato thereforeoffers an illuminating role for pleasure in ethics and psychology, one to which we may be unaccustomed: pleasure emerges not as a sensation or even a mode of activity, but as an attitude - one of the ways in which we construe our world - and as such, a central part of every character.

Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics
Plato and the Foundations of Metaphysics

Author: Hans Joachim Kramer

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1990-10-09

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1438409648

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This is a book about the relationship of the two traditions of Platonic interpretation -- the indirect and the direct traditions, the written dialogues and the unwritten doctrines. Kramer, who is the foremost proponent of the Tubingen School of interpretation, presents the unwritten doctrines as the crown of Plato's system and the key revealing it. Kramer unfolds the philosophical significance of the unwritten doctrines in their fullness. He demonstrates the hermeneutic fruitfulness of the unwritten doctrines when applied to the dialogues. He shows that the doctrines are a revival of the presocratic theory renovated and brought to a new plane through Socrates. In this way, Plato emerges as the creator of classical metaphysics. In the Third Part, Kramer compares the structure of Platonism, as construed by the Tubingen School, with current philosophical structures such as analytic philosophy, Hegel, phenomenology, and Heidegger. Of the five appendices, the most important presents English translations of the ancient testimonies on the unwritten doctrines. These include the "self-testimonies of Plato." There is also a bibliography on the problem of the unwritten doctrines.

Plato versus Parmenides
Plato versus Parmenides

Author: Robert J. Roecklein

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2010-12-16

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0739150790

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The issue of coming into being in Greek philosophy is investigated mostly by specialists in language analysis and philological science. Plato versus Parmenides, Robert J. Roecklein brings to the fore Plato's refutation of Parmenides' argument in his famous dialogue by that name. Roecklein offers an unprecedented exposition of the dialogue the Parmenides, and seeks to illuminate a political dimension in Parmenides' early formulations of the challenges made to the reality of coming into being in nature.