James Adam's edition of Plato's Republic with an introduction by D. A. Rees reviewing Adam's work on the language and meaning of the book.

'PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas' as S. T. Coleridge understood it, is the theme of this book. It considers the most vital and mature vein of Coleridge's thought to be the contemplation of ideas objectively, as existing powers. A theory of ideas emerges in critical engagement with thinkers including Plato, Plotinus, Böhme, Kant, and Schelling. A commitment to the transcendence of reason, central to what he calls the spiritual platonic old England, distinguishes him from his German contemporaries. The book also engages with Coleridge's poetry, especially in a culminating chapter dedicated to the Limbo sequence. This book pursues a theory of contemplation that draws from Coleridge's theories of imagination and the Ideas of Reason in his published texts and extensively from his thoughts as they developed throughout unpublished works, fragments, letters, and notebooks. He posited a hierarchy of cognition from basic sense intuition to the apprehension of scientific, ethical, and theological ideas. The structure of the book follows this thesis, beginning with sense data, moving upwards into aesthetic experience, imagination, and reason, with final chapters on formal logic and poetry that constellate the contemplation of ideas. Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy is not just a work of history of philosophy, it addresses a figure whose thinking is of continuing interest, arguing that contemplation of ideas and values has consequences for everyday morality and aesthetics, as well as metaphysics. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, scholars of religion, and of literature.

Platon zählt zu den einflussreichsten Philosophen aller Zeiten. Er beeinflusste maßgeblich Profil und Kanon der westlichen Philosophie. Die Kritik am sogenannten Platonismus wurde kontinuierlich von den Schwierigkeiten gespeist, die die Interpretation der philosophischen Schriften Platons bereitet. Gemeinhin wird er als rein rationaler Philosoph gesehen. Ein Philosoph war er in der Tat, ebenso jedoch ein Experte in der Annäherung an das Nicht-Rationale, unter anderem in Form von Mythen. So wurde er auch als "Mythenerfinder" und "Mythologe" bezeichnet. Platon war ein Visionär, der es wagte, das Reich des Nicht-Rationalen auf systematische und disziplinierte Art zu erforschen. Insgesamt lässt sich Platons philosophisches Vorhaben als Streben nach einer umfassenden Sicht des organischen Ganzen klassifizieren. Der Ausdruck „Gestalt“ scheint die Ganzheit am ehesten zu beschreiben. Platon kann als prominentester und auch als letzter Repräsentant der antiken Philosophie angesehen werden, der die Entwicklung einer Gestalt-Philosophie anstrebte. Plato is one of the most influential philosophers of all time. He decisively shaped the profile and canon of western philosophy. Criticism of what has become known as Platonism has been continuously nourished by the difficulties of interpreting this philosopher's writings. Plato is commonly viewed as a purely rational philosopher. A philosopher he was indeed, but Plato was also an expert in approaching the non-rational, in the form of mythology among others. Plato has been called a "mythmaker" and a "mythologist". Plato was a visionary who dared to explore the realm of the non-rational in a systematic and disciplined way. In an overall comparison, Plato's philosophical enterprise strives for a comprehensive perspective on the organic whole. The expression "Gestalt" seems to come closest to describing the wholeness. Plato may be considered to be the most prominent representative of classical philosophy to develop a Gestalt philosophy and also the last to do so in antiquity.

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As he explicates the major themes and arguments of the dialogue, Benardete also shows how these strands of argument are interwoven throughout the Laws and then sets them against the quite different arguments on the same themes found in The Republic and The Statesman."--BOOK JACKET.