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Title: The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues by Thomas L. Pangle, Plato ISBN: 0-8014-9465-6 Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr Pub. Date: January, 1988 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: the best existing translations of these dialogs
Comment: The book contains excellent, literal translations of ten dialogues that ancient tradition has included in the Platonic corpus. To date, these are the best translations of these dialogues in publication. However, the reader should be warned that six of these ten are now almost universally considered to have been written by someone other than Plato, and in fact by someone whose skills at writing philosophical dialogues is considerably inferior to Plato's. The editor argues vigorously (in his Introduction) against this widespread opinion, but I think ultimately unconvincingly. The Hipparchus, Minos, Lovers, Cleitophon, Theages, and Alcibiades the First are pretty clearly not by Plato, though there is good reason to believe they were written within a couple hundred years after his death, probably by members of the Academy, and were later included alongside Plato's own works for reasons we cannot know. There is some justification, then, for these six dialogues having been for the most part "forgotten". It is in some sense good that these works have finally been well translated, but I believe that in the end our time is much more profitably spent studying dialogues that are obviously far superior (even *if* they were to have the same author).
This is by no means a good reason against buying the book; for it also includes excellent translations of the genuinely Platonic Laches, Hippias Minor, Hippias Major, and Ion. It should be pointed out that the inclusion of these in the present volume rather belies Pangle's subtitle; for these four works are so far from "forgotten" that at least two of them (Laches, Ion) are today regularly included even in many introductory philosophy courses, and all four are quite familiar to and not at all neglected by today's Socrates- and Plato-scholars. The Laches, for example, is the main source of the interpretation, now commonly accepted, that Socrates thinks that virtue is knowledge of good and bad. And the Ion contains a well-known Socratic criticism of the interpreters of poets.
Each translation is accompanied by an interpretative essay in the rather freewheeling, but always thought-provoking Straussian style.
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Title: Giants and Dwarfs : Essays 1960-1990 by Allan Bloom ISBN: 0671747266 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: September, 1991 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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Title: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics by Joe Sachs ISBN: 1585100358 Publisher: Focus Publishing / R. Pullins & Co Pub. Date: 01 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Aristotle on Poetics by Aristotle, Seth Benardete, Michael Davis ISBN: 1587310260 Publisher: Saint Augustine's Pr Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
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Title: Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham by Thomas L. Pangle ISBN: 0801873282 Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr Pub. Date: August, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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