Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues | Date: 28 April 2011, 08:47
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Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues
By Catherine H. Zuckert
* Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
* Number Of Pages: 896
* Publication Date: 2009-06-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0226993353
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780226993355
Product Description:
Faced with the difficult task of discerning Plato’s true ideas from the contradictory voices he used to express them, scholars have never fully made sense of the many incompatibilities within and between the dialogues. In the magisterial Plato’s Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert explains for the first time how these prose dramas cohere to reveal a comprehensive Platonic understanding of philosophy.
To expose this coherence, Zuckert examines the dialogues not in their supposed order of composition but according to the dramatic order in which Plato indicates they took place. This unconventional arrangement lays bare a narrative of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. In the drama’s earliest dialogues, for example, non-Socratic philosophers introduce the political and philosophical problems to which Socrates tries to respond. A second dramatic group shows how Socrates develops his distinctive philosophical style. And, finally, the later dialogues feature interlocutors who reveal his philosophy’s limitations. Despite these limitations, Zuckert concludes, Plato made Socrates the dialogues’ central figure because Socrates raises the fundamental human question: what is the best way to live?
Plato’s dramatization of Socratic imperfections suggests, moreover, that he recognized the apparently unbridgeable gap between our understandings of human life and the nonhuman world. At a time when this gap continues to raise questions—about the division between sciences and the humanities and the potentially dehumanizing effects of scientific progress—Zuckert’s brilliant interpretation of the entire Platonic corpus offers genuinely new insights into worlds past and present
Review
"Plato's Philosophers is brilliantly conceived, remarkably well executed, decidedly innovative, and enormously important. Illuminating a pattern of dramatic cohesiveness within Plato's body of work, Catherine Zuckert offers a compelling alternative to interpretations that trace a developmental logic across the dialogues. This book will spur us to rethink concepts and perspectives that have been taken for granted for too long. It is magisterial in the finest sense." - Gerald Mara, Georgetown University"
Summary: A paradigm shift in Plato studies
Rating: 5
Prof. Zuckert offers in this amazing piece of scholarship a full review of Plato's Dialogues, from the perspective of their literary setting. The author's hermeneutical commitment is clear: A single dialogue can only be interpreted against the background of the complete set of Plato's Dialogues. And the entire collection of Plato's Dialogues cannot be understood based on compositional criteria, according to which there would be juvenile, transitional, mature, critical and old-age dialogues. Instead Zuckert follows the trend established by authors like Jacob Howland and Drew A. Hyland that reads the Dialogues in the dramatological order derived from their literary contents. However, Zuckert goes farther than previous scholars and proposes a comprehensive reading of the whole corpus. This reading makes manifest the originating motives of Socrates' engagement with philosophy, how it developed itself through successive stages, and what limits had eventually to confront. The table of contents can offer a glimpse of the wide scope and deep scholarship of this book.
Introduction: Platonic dramatology (1)
Part I: The political and philosophical problems (49)
1. Using Pre-Socratic philosophy to support political reform. The Athenian Stranger (51)
2. Plato's Parmenides: Parmenides' critique of Socrates and Plato's critique of Parmenides (147)
3. Becoming Socrates (180)
4. Socrates interrogates his contemporaries about the noble and good (215)
Part II: Two paradigms of philosophy (279)
5. Socrates' positive teaching (281)
6. Timaeus-Critias: Completing or challenging Socratic political philosophy? (420)
7. Socratic practice (482)
Conclusion to Part II: What the contrast with Timaeus tells us about Socrates (586)
Part III: The trial and death of Socrates (593)
8. The limits of human intelligence (595)
9. The Eleatic challenge (680)
10. The trial and death of Socrates (736)
Conclusion: Why Plato made Socrates his hero (815)
Bibliography (863)
Index (881)
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