The Portable Plato

by Plato (Author); Buchanan, Scott (Editor)

• ISBN13: 9780140150407
• ISBN10: 0140150404
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1977-03-01
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)

Summary

Writing in the fourth century B.C., in an Athens that had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Plato formulated questions that have haunted the moral, religious, and political imagination of the West for more than 2,000 years: what is virtue? How should we love? What constitutes a good society? Is there a soul that outlasts the body and a truth that transcends appearance? What do we know and how do we know it? Plato's inquiries were all the more resonant because he couched them in the form of dramatic and often highly comic dialogues, whose principal personage was the ironic, teasing, and relentlessly searching philosopher Socrates. In this splendid collection, Scott Buchanan brings together the most important of Plato's dialogues, including Protagoras, The Symposium, with its barbed conjectures about the relation between love and madness, Phaedo and The Republic, his monumental work of political philosophy. Buchanan's learned and engaging introduction allows us to see Plato both as a commentator on his society and as a shaper of the societies that followed, who bequeathed to us a hunger for the ideal as well as a redeeming habit of humane skepticism.

Table of Contents

Editor's Introduction	1	(33)
A Note on the Theatrical Machinery of the Dialogues	34	(6)
Chronology	40	(1)
Bibliography	41	(4)
Protagoras	45	(76)
Symposium	121	(70)
Phaedo	191
The Republic
Book I	281
Book II	324
Book III	364
Book IV	413
Book V	454
Book VI	504
Book VII	546
Book VIII	585
Book IX	625
Book X	658