Plato: Republic, Apology, and Crito: Republic

The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic consists of thirteen new essays written by both established scholars and younger researchers with the specific aim of helping readers to understand Plato’s masterwork.

This volume contains fourteen new essays discussing Plato's views about knowledge, reality, mathematics, politics, ethics, love, poetry, and religion. There are also analyses of the intellectual and social background of his thought, the development of his philosophy throughout his career, the range of alternative approaches to his work, and the stylometry of his writing.

This Companion provides a comprehensive account of this outstanding work, which remains among the most frequently read works of Greek philosophy, indeed of Classical antiquity in general. The sixteen essays, by authors who represent various academic disciplines, bring a spectrum of interpretive approaches to bear in order to aid the understanding of a wide-ranging audience, from first-time readers of the Republic who require guidance, to more experienced readers who wish to explore contemporary currents in the work's interpretation. The three initial chapters address aspects of the work as a whole. They are followed by essays that match closely the sequence in which topics are presented in the ten books of the Republic. Since the Republic returns frequently to the same topics by different routes, so do the authors of this volume, who provide the readers with divergent yet complementary perspectives by which to appreciate the Republic's principal concerns.

The City and Man consists of provocative essays by the late Leo Strauss on Aristotle's Politics, Plato's Republic, and Thucydides' Peloponnesian Wars. Together, the essays constitute a brilliant attempt to use classical political philosophy as a means of liberating modern political philosophy from the stranglehold of ideology. The essays are based on a long and intimate familiarity with the works, but the essay on Aristotle is especially important as one of Strauss's few writings on the philosopher who largely shaped Strauss's conception of antiquity. The essay on Plato is a full-scale discussion of Platonic political philosophy, wide in scope yet compact in execution. When discussing Thucydides, Strauss succeeds not only in presenting the historian as a moral thinker of high rank, but in drawing his thought into the orbit of philosophy, and thus indicating a relation of history and philosophy that does not presuppose the absorption of philosophy by history.

A step by step, passage by passage analysis of the complete Republic. White shows how the argument of the book is articulated, the important interconnections among its elements, and the coherent and carefully developed train of though which motivates its complex philosophical reasoning. In his extensive introduction, White describes Plato's aims, introduces the argument, and discusses the major philosophical and ethical theories embodied in the Republic. He then summarizes each of its ten books and provides substantial explanatory and interpretive notes.

A Guide to Plato's Republic provides an integral interpretation of the Republic which is accessible even to readers approaching Plato's masterwork for the first time. Written at a level understandable to undergraduates, it is ideal for students and other readers who have little or no background in philosophy or political theory. Rice anticipates their inevitable reactions to the Republic and treats them seriously, opening the way to an appreciation of the complexities of the text without oversimplifying it.

This collection of essays, diverse in character, records a symposium held at Swarthmore in November 1974 to celebrate Plato's alleged 2,400th birthday. The papers are "The Theory of Social Justice in the Polis in Plato's Republic" by Gregory Vlastos, "Plato on Law and Nature" by Martin Oswald, "Dialectic, Myth and History in the Philosophy of Plato" by John F. Callahan, and "Plato and Science" by Friedrich Solmsen. This collection also includes two indices, locorum and general.

This interpretive introduction provides unique insight into Plato's Republic. Stressing Plato's desire to stimulate philosophical thinking in his readers, Julia Annas here demonstrates the coherence of his main moral argument on the nature of justice, and expounds related concepts of education, human motivation, knowledge and understanding. In a clear systematic fashion, this book shows that modern moral philosophy still has much to learn from Plato's attempt to move the focus from questions of what acts the just person ought to perform to the more profound questions of what sort of person the just person ought to be.

This book brings together in a single volume historically important theories of art and recent and contemporary discussions of aesthetic problems. It is designed to serve both as a text for courses in aesthetics or philosophy of art and as an introduction to these subjects for all who are interested in the arts.

First published in 1981, this unique study discusses the evolution of Plato's thought through the actual developments in Athenian democracy, the book also demonstrates Plato's continuing responses to changes in political theory and argues for a new understanding of Plato's goals for the state and his ultimate concern for the moral well-being of the citizens.

Plato and the Republic, 2nd edition assesses and introduces Plato's life and the background to the Republic, the text and the ideas of the Republic, and Plato's continuing importance to Western thought.

The text of this book is a resume of the entire body of the Platonic writings. The endeavor has been to omit no significant ideas and to give with every idea enough of the dramatic setting and the over-and undertones of feeling to forestall the misunderstandings to which abstract analyses and propagandist quotations of Plato are especially liable.

Jordan organizes Plato's work to show that even though Plato did not set out to create a coherent philosophy, he certainly did so as he worked out his ideas over time.

In confronting both male and female biases, Bluestone addresses some of the most debated issues of our time. She questions whether women have special qualities that make them naturally better or worse equipped for leadership than men, arguing convincingly against sociobiological views of gender differences. In defending the predominance of reason as the arbiter of excellence and the key to justice, she offers a spirited critique of current feminist theory. Her writing is personal, sometimes humorous, and yet rigorously analytic, as she reveals the difficulties inherent in philosophical discussions involving gender, the prevalence in the academy of discrimination against women, and the continuing importance of the issues Plato raised in the Republic.

You'd never know Athens was locked in a life-or-death struggle from the tranquil and leisurely philosophical discussion that unfolds through the pages of the Republic. Plato's masterpiece continues to inform our questions and our thinking when it comes to being, truth, beauty, goodness, justice, community, the soul, and more.