Early Socratic Dialogues

Author: Emlyn-Jones Chris
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141914076
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Rich in drama and humour, they include the controversial Ion, a debate on poetic inspiration; Laches, in which Socrates seeks to define bravery; and Euthydemus, which considers the relationship between philosophy and politics. Together, these dialogues provide a definitive portrait of the real Socrates and raise issues still keenly debated by philosophers, forming an incisive overview of Plato's philosophy.

The Structure of Enquiry in Plato's Early Dialogues

Author: Vasilis Politis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107068118
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
Offers an alternative interpretation and defends a radically new view of Plato's method of argument in the early dialogues.

Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato

Author: Sandra Peterson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139497979
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
In Plato's Apology, Socrates says he spent his life examining and questioning people on how best to live, while avowing that he himself knows nothing important. Elsewhere, however, for example in Plato's Republic, Plato's Socrates presents radical and grandiose theses. In this book Sandra Peterson offers a hypothesis which explains the puzzle of Socrates' two contrasting manners. She argues that the apparently confident doctrinal Socrates is in fact conducting the first step of an examination: by eliciting his interlocutors' reactions, his apparently doctrinal lectures reveal what his interlocutors believe is the best way to live. She tests her hypothesis by close reading of passages in the Theaetetus, Republic and Phaedo. Her provocative conclusion, that there is a single Socrates whose conception and practice of philosophy remain the same throughout the dialogues, will be of interest to a wide range of readers in ancient philosophy and classics.

Cross-Examining Socrates

Author: John Beversluis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521550581
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
This book is a rereading of Plato's early dialogues from the point of view of the characters with whom Socrates engages in debate. Socrates' interlocutors are generally acknowledged to play important dialectical and dramatic roles, but no previous book has focused mainly on them. Existing studies are thoroughly dismissive of the interlocutors and reduce them to the status of mere mouthpieces for views which are hopelessly confused or demonstrably false. This book takes interlocutors seriously and treats them as genuine intellectual opponents whose views are often more defensible than commentators have standardly thought. The author's purpose is not to summarise their positions or the arguments of the dialogues in which they appear, much less to produce a series of biographical sketches, but to investigate the phenomenology of philosophical disputation as it manifests itself in the early dialogues.

Plato and the Socratic Dialogue

Author: Charles H. Kahn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521433259
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Book Description
This book offers a new interpretation of Plato's early and middle dialogues as the expression of a unified philosophical vision. Whereas the traditional view sees the dialogues as marking successive stages in Plato's philosophical development, we may more legitimately read them as reflecting an artistic plan for the gradual, indirect and partial exposition of Platonic philosophy. The magnificent literary achievement of the dialogues can be fully appreciated only from the viewpoint of a unitarian reading of the philosophical content.

Socratic Education in Plato's Early Dialogues

Author: Henry Teloh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description

Conversations of Socrates

Author: Xenophon
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141915447
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 661

Book Description
After the execution of Socrates in 399 BC, a number of his followers wrote dialogues featuring him as the protagonist and, in so doing, transformed the great philosopher into a legendary figure. Xenophon's portrait is the only one other than Plato's to survive, and while it offers a very personal interpretation of Socratic thought, it also reveals much about the man and his philosophical views. In 'Socrates' Defence' Xenophon defends his mentor against charges of arrogance made at his trial, while the 'Memoirs of Socrates' also starts with an impassioned plea for the rehabilitation of a wronged reputation. Along with 'The Estate-Manager', a practical economic treatise, and 'The Dinner-Party', a sparkling exploration of love, Xenophon's dialogues offer fascinating insights into the Socratic world and into the intellectual atmosphere and daily life of ancient Greece.

Plato's Introduction of Forms

Author: R. M. Dancy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139456237
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
Scholars of Plato are divided between those who emphasize the literature of the dialogues and those who emphasize the argument of the dialogues, and between those who see a development in the thought of the dialogues and those who do not. In this important book Russell Dancy focuses on the arguments and defends a developmental picture. He explains the Theory of Forms of the Phaedo and Symposium as an outgrowth of the quest for definitions canvassed in the Socratic dialogues, by constructing a Theory of Definition for the Socratic dialogues based on the refutations of definitions in those dialogues, and showing how that theory is mirrored in the Theory of Forms. His discussion, notable for both its clarity and its meticulous scholarship, ranges in detail over a number of Plato's early and middle dialogues, and will be of interest to readers in Plato studies and in ancient philosophy more generally.

Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue

Author: Alessandro Stavru
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004341226
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 941

Book Description
Socrates and the Socratic Dialogue assembles the most complete range of studies on Socrates and the Socratic dialogue. It focuses on portrayals of Socrates, whether as historical figure or protagonist of ‘Socratic dialogues’, in extant and fragmentary texts from Classical Athens through Late Antiquity. Special attention is paid to the evolving power and texture of the Socratic icon as it adopted old and new uses in philosophy, biography, oratory, and literature. Chapters in this volume focus on Old Comedy, Sophistry, the first-generation Socratics including Plato and Xenophon, Aristotle and Aristoxenus, Epicurus and Stoicism, Cicero and Persius, Plutarch, Apuleius and Maximus, Diogenes Laertius, Libanius, Themistius, Julian, and Proclus.

The Trial and Death of Socrates

Author: Plato
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486111342
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
Among the most important and influential philosophical works in Western thought: the dialogues entitled Euthyphro, Apology, Crito and Phaedo. Translations by distinguished classical scholar Benjamin Jowett.