Plato's Philosophers

Name: Plato's Philosophers
Price: 61.95 AUD
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ISBN: 9780226007748

The Coherence of the Dialogues

Catherine H. Zuckert

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English

Chicago University Press
30 October 2012

Philosophy; Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500

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.

By: Catherine H. Zuckert
Imprint: Chicago University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 23mm, Width: 16mm, Spine: 5mm
Weight: 1.191kg
ISBN: 9780226007748
ISBN 10: 022600774X
Publication Date: 30 October 2012
Audience: General/trade , Adult education , ELT Advanced , Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Reviews for Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues

No serious student of Plato could fail to benefit from [Zuckert's] careful, intelligent, probing, and illuminating discussions. . . . An important, impressive, and, one hopes, lasting book. --Mark Blitz, Claremont Review --Mark Blitz Claremont Review