The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)

The first edition of the Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992), edited by Richard Kraut, shaped scholarly research and guided new students for thirty years. This new edition introduces students to fresh approaches to Platonic dialogues while advancing the next generation of research. Of its seventeen chapters, nine are entirely new, written by a new generation of scholars. Six others have been thoroughly revised and updated by their original authors. The volume covers the full range of Plato's interests, including ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, religion, mathematics, and psychology. Plato's dialogues are approached as unified works and considered within their intellectual context, and the revised introduction suggests a way of reading the dialogues that attends to the differences between them while also tracing their interrelations. The result is a rich and wide-ranging volume which will be valuable for all students and scholars of Plato. 01.0_pp_i_i_The_Cambridge_Companion_to_Plato 1 02.0_pp_ii_iv_Other_Volumes_in_the_Series_of_Cambridge_Companions 7 03.0_pp_v_v_The_Cambridge_Companion_to_Plato 13 04.0_pp_vi_vi_Copyright_page 19 05.0_pp_vii_viii_Contents 25 06.0_pp_ix_xi_Contributors 27 07.0_pp_xii_xii_Acknowledgments 30 08.0_pp_xiii_xiv_Chronology 31 09.0_pp_xv_xviii_Abbreviations 33 10.0_pp_1_38_Introduction_to_the_Study_of_Plato 37 11.0_pp_39_81_Plato_in_his_Context 75 12.0_pp_82_116_Stylometry_and_Chronology 118 13.0_pp_117_145_Platos_Socrates_and_his_Conception_of_Philosophy 153 14.0_pp_146_172_Being_Good_at_Being_Bad_Platos_Hippias_Minor 182 15.0_pp_173_201_Inquiry_in_the_Meno 209 16.0_pp_202_232_Why_Eros 238 17.0_pp_233_267_Plato_on_Philosophy_and_the_Mysteries 269 18.0_pp_268_297_The_Unfolding_Account_of_Forms_in_the_Phaedo 304 19.0_pp_298_327_The_Defense_of_Justice_in_Platos_Republic 334 20.0_pp_328_357_Plato_on_Poetic_Creativity_A_Revision 364 21.0_pp_358_398_Betwixt_and_Between_Plato_and_the_Objects_of_Mathematics 394 22.0_pp_399_432_Another_Goodbye_to_the_Third_Man 435 23.0_pp_433_463_Platos_Sophist_on_False_Statements 469 24.0_pp_464_492_Cosmology_and_Human_Nature_in_the_Timaeus 500 25.0_pp_493_521_The_Fourfold_Classification_and_Socrates_Craft_Analogy_in_the_Philebus 529 26.0_pp_522_558_Law_in_Platos_Late_Politics 558 27.0_pp_559_591_Bibliography 595 28.0_pp_592_611_Index_Locorum 628 29.0_pp_612_620_General_Index 648 30.0_pp_621_624_Other_Volumes_in_the_Series_of_Cambridge_Companions_continued_from_page_iii 657 "Plato (424/3-348/7 B.C.) stands at the head of the Western philosophical tradition, the first to write on a wide range of topics still discussed by philosophers today under such headings as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, and the philosophies of art, love, language, mathematics, science, and religion. He may in this sense be said to have invented philosophy as a distinct subject, for although all of these topics were discussed by his intellectual predecessors and contemporaries, he was the first to give them a unified treatment. He conceives of philosophy as a subject with a distinctive intellectual method, and he makes radical claims for its position in human life and the political community. Because philosophy scrutinizes assumptions that other studies merely take for granted, it alone can provide genuine understanding; since it discovers things inaccessible to the senses and yields an organized system of truths that go far beyond and frequently undermine common sense, it should transform the way we live our lives and arrange our political affairs. It is an autonomous subject and not the instrument of any other subject, power, or creed; on the contrary, because it alone can grasp what is most important in human life, all other human endeavors should be subordinate to it"-- Provided by publisher