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Title: Plato Complete Works by Plato, John M. Cooper, D. S. Hutchinson ISBN: 0-87220-349-2 Publisher: Hackett Pub Co Pub. Date: May, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $48.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.76 (29 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Such a warm and comfy volume!
Comment: Usually I don't have a head for collected works: I had much more fun reading Hamlet in a slim, single volume than I would've in the clumsy Riverside Shakespeare. This book is an exception. It is absolutely wonderful to have the world of Plato at one's fingertips; to flip through the dialogues and letters and definitions and just take in a few pages, perhaps going back and reading one entire if one finds it at all interesting.
About Plato as a philosopher, it's hard to write a review. I used to be one of the many students to hate Plato; not anymore. My thinking is, The Republic shouldn't be read until a fair amount of other works are read. Plato just says too many neat things--all of them more than make up for the sometimes-doubtful though sometimes quite interesting philosophy of the Republic. Example: "Time is a moving image of eternity." (I paraphrase here...) That's from Timaeus. Now those are the words of a true mystic in touch with the grandness of the universe--not the seeming fascist who wrote The Laws.
In order to read Plato, you've just got to focus on all the good stuff the man wrote. When you do this, the seemingly beastly stuff will make more sense--though you may not agree with it.
I hasten to add that The Symposium is a much better place to start than The Republic. If you are new to Plato, read this first--and delight: Here is a work both profound, funny, and sexy, just like some of our own century's better literature (Proust, Joyce).
Rating: 5
Summary: One of the great books of all time
Comment: In ancient times, Plato was regarded as one who writes most beautifully, and even in translation his mastery comes forward.
Reading this book, you are at the beginning of philosophy. There are beautiful dialogs concerning the most profound questions anyone can ask.
An advantage of this particular book is that for a reasonable price you can own Plato's complete works in modern scholarly translations. The volume is skillfully edited and there are handy notes.
Plato is one of the few philosophers who can be read for pleasure. His influence on Western thought is immense. As Whitehead says, subsequent Western philosophy is just footnotes to Plato.
Here are some of the works collected in this volume -
Apology - Socrates defense of his life
Phaedo - a defense of the immortality of the soul
Euthyrpo - a criticism of the Divine Command theory of ethics
Republic - the ideal commonwealth, what is justice, theory of ideas
Meno - the recollection theory of knowledge
Timaeus - Plato's story of the creation of the universe, his cosmology
Rating: 3
Summary: The best extensive collection. At least its "complete"....
Comment: The main improvements, as far as I can tell, that Cooper has made, in comparison to Hamilton & Cairns' popular collection, are in not using any translations by Cornford or Jowett and in "completing" the "Platonic" corpus, i.e. by including Alcibiades I, Alcibiades II, Cleitophon, Hipparchus, Minos, Lovers, and Theages. But I don't know how much readers of the Hamilton & Cairns collection missed any of these (or even whether they *should* have missed any of them), except Alcibiades I and *perhaps* the Cleitophon, since (except for these two) they are mostly agreed to be spurious.
Two other good points of Cooper's text are his Introduction (which is refreshingly unbiased with respect, e.g., to the question of the chronology of the dialogues) and the Index.
On to some criticisms:
The translations are not particularly good, except Rowe's rendition of the Statesman (though I think Seth Benardete's was better). I should say, though, that it is a great relief finally to see the end of the reign of Jowett's and Cornford's awful and inaccurate translations, many of which were included in Hamilton & Cairns' collection. (When I say "good", I mean mostly *literal*.) But it doesn't help that there has been little or no effort put into getting the various translators to agree on how to translate of important Greek terms, or even into getting a single translator to translate important terms consistently: Cooper explains, "...No general effort has been made to ensure consistency in the translation of recurrent words or phrases across the vast extent of Plato's works (that would intrude too greatly on the prerogatives and the individual judgment of the translators to whose scholarly expertise we are indebted for these _Complete Works_)..." (xxviii). And there are *many* translators; with a few exceptions (notably Grube's translation of Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, Meno, Phaedo, Republic), there is practically a different translator or pair of translators for each dialogue. Also, aside from new translations of the spurious works, most translations of the genuine Platonic works in Cooper's text have been previously published, mostly by Hackett. The only new translations of (probably) genuine Platonic works are those of the Alcibiades I, Cratylus, Epinomis, Hippias Minor, Menexenus, Critias, Timaeus. And "new", of course, doesn't necessarily (or even usually) mean *better*.
Cooper makes a very telling comment about his expectations of translation: "When we English-speaking readers turn to Plato's texts, we want to find a Plato who speaks in English--our English..." (xxvi). This is easy to grant in one sense: we of course want an *English* translation. But Cooper's comment seems to suggest that we readers want Plato to SPEAK LIKE WE DO. I don't know that this is something that we *should* expect. After all, Plato spoke and thought in a language that is very different from our language, and almost 2 dozen centuries separates us from the man himself and the ideas he expresses: we cannot expect him to talk or think like us, and if we try to make him do so then we will likely turn Plato's words into bland expressions of things we already know are true or things we already know are false. We should expect much more from one of the greatest minds of all time.
Cooper has preserved the Thrasyllan arrangement of the dialogues. I can't think of any good reason why he did so, other than for the sake of preserving tradition (see his pp. x-xi). That arrangement does not agree with most modern views on the actual order in which the dialogues where written. I can appreciate why Cooper didn't try to arrange them in accordance with any modern view. But as a student, I find the Thrasyllan order continually frustrating: I just can't get accustomed to the arrangement (the farthest I've come is to understand that the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo are somewhere in the beginning of the book); I find myself regularly having to consult the table of contents to find the dialogue I'm looking for. For easier reference I would much rather have the dialogues simply arranged alphabetically (keeping the "Letters" and the clearly spurious works in the back).
Lastly, the physical book itself (particularly the binding) is not very durable. The pages are very thin, as I'm sure they must be to keep the volume to a manageable size, a little over 2.25 inches thick. But the binding on mine came unglued not too long after I started using it.
I guess it's good in some sense--convenient--to have the entire "Platonic corpus" all in one volume. But in many cases, I have found myself still using (and buying) translations that are superior to the ones Cooper has included in this collection. But for those who want most or all of Plato's works without having to buy many separate volumes, this is the best one-volume collection available.
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Title: Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 1 by Aristotle, J. Barnes ISBN: 069101650X Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 1995 List Price(USD): $47.50 |
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Title: The Basic Works of Aristotle by Richard McKeon, C.D.C. Reeve, Aristotle ISBN: 0375757996 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 11 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Cambridge Companion to Plato by Richard Kraut ISBN: 0521436109 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 30 October, 1992 List Price(USD): $33.00 |
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Title: The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle by Jonathan Barnes ISBN: 0521422949 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 27 January, 1995 List Price(USD): $29.00 |
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Title: The Landmark Thucydides : A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War by Victor Davis Hanson ISBN: 0684827905 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 10 September, 1998 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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