Plato became the master for every dictator by sidesteping the Socratic method in his platonic state. Plato invented the subjective in an attempt to demean the objective and shuffle away the predicate philosophy of Socrates. The Platonic Idiom expreses the infirmity of western civilization.

Who is Socrates? While most readers know him as the central figure in Plato's work, he is hard to characterize. In this book, S. Montgomery Ewegen opens this long-standing and difficult question once again. Reading Socrates against a number of Platonic texts, Ewegen sets out to understand the way of Socrates. Taking on the nuances and contours of the Socrates that emerges from the dramatic and philosophical contexts of Plato's works, Ewegen considers questions of withdrawal, retreat, powerlessness, poverty, concealment, and release and how they construct a new view of Socrates. For Ewegen, Socrates is a powerful but strange and uncanny figure. Ewegen's withdrawn Socrates forever evades rigid interpretation and must instead remain a deep and insoluble question.

Using The Cave as a key to Plato's political thought, Huard debunks conventional interpretations, conservative and progressive, and unfolds Plato's notions about the structure of the world and his ideas about justice and human well being, and challenges many of our conceptions of the cosmos and deeply held political beliefs.

"Baracchi has identified pivotal points around which the Republic operates; this allows a reading of the entire text to unfold.... a very beautifully written book." -- Walter Brogan "... a work that opens new and timely vistas within the Republic.... Her approach... is thorough and rigorous." -- John Sallis Although Plato's Republic is perhaps the most influential text in the history of Western philosophy, Claudia Baracchi finds that the work remains obscure and enigmatic. To fully understand and appreciate its meaning, she argues, we must attend to what its original language discloses. Through a close reading of the Greek text, attentive to the pervasiveness of story and myth, Baracchi investigates the dialogue's major themes. The first part of the book addresses issues of generation, reproduction, and decay as they apply to the founding of Socrates' just city. The second part takes up the connection between war and the cycle of life, employing a thorough analysis of Plato's rendition of the myth of Er. Baracchi shows that the Republic is concerned throughout with the complex but intertwined issues of life and war, locating the site of this tangled web of growth and destruction in the mythical dimension of the Platonic city.

Plato is perhaps the best known and most widely studied of all the ancient Greek philosophers. A pupil of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, his ideas have inspired and influenced scholars of nearly every era. His famous series of dialogues have become a standard part of the western philosophical canon – from the Euthyphro and Gorgias of his early period, the Republic, Phaedrus and Symposium of his middle period, to the Theaetetus and Laws of his late period.The Routledge Library Edition makes available in a single set an outstanding range of scholarship devoted to Plato’s philosophical work. Routledge Library Editions:Plato makes available in a single set an outstanding range of scholarship devoted to Plato’s philosophical work. The 21 volumes provide detailed analysis of his writings and philosophical ideas. From the classic works of Francis Cornford, G. C. Field and A.E. Taylor to more recent approaches and interpretations, this set provides libraries and scholars with a century of outstanding scholarship on this key philosopher.

Plato's conversations of Socrates are among the most accessible philosophical texts most of us have ever read, yet the more one pursues the art or intelligibility of this writing, the more mysterious and paradoxical the Platonic texts become. What does it mean to study Plato, not philosophically as a maker of arguments, not poetically as a maker of dialogues, but literally as a maker of texts? This is a question that Jacques Derrida has made his own, and in this book Farness creates a dialogue with Derrida on Plato's texts. Missing Socrates also provides a dialogue between Plato and Socrates on the question of speech versus writing and a study of the materiality of Plato's writing. Included among the various dialogues and themes developed here are rhetoric and courtroom practice in the Apology of Socrates; religion, skepticism, and the idea of transcendence in the Euthyphro; artistic practice and tradition in the Ion; education and political discipline in the Charmides; and rhetoric, writing, commemoration, and the motives of authorship in Phaedrus. In each of these discursive settings, Socrates unsuccessfully seeks a place or a mode for philosophy; Farness shows that the dialogues of Plato uncannily supply that lack.