"This is the first volume of, I believe, four volumes consisting of most of Plato's dialogues with an essay paired with each one. Of course, Platonic philosophy lies at the foundation of Western thought, and anyone wishing to gain perspective on our own times would be well-advised to go back to our intellectual and cultural origins. Plato's ideas can be found even today, and especially in how Christianity treats the concept of sin and how it relates to the soul.
This volume consists of six dialogues- the Euthyphro, the Apology, the Crito, the Meno, Gorgias, and Menexenus. The first three can be thematically grouped in dealing with the trial of Scorates. The later three don't have the same cohesion, but they broadly deal with rhetoric.
The question of "what is virtue" unifies all of these dialogues. Is it virtuous for us to put on trial someone we believe to be disrupting the social order? If our own social order valuable enough to warrant that level of protection? How can I charge a man with a crime when I myself do not understand virtue? Is it virtuous to use baseless political rhetoric to achieve one's end? Is it ever virtuous to enact retribution on someone who has harmed you? Finally, is it virtuous to disobey a legal sentence that has unjustly punished you?
The answers to most of these questions given in the text is "no", but answers are scarcely given. These dialogues focus much more on revealing how shallow and nominal most of our ideas are. We argue about what constitutes "justice" in politics all the time, and yet Plato and Socrates would say that very few of us have any proper idea of what we mean when we use that word.
This particular set of translations is fluid and easy to understand. The accompanying essays are good for presenting a historical context for the plays or for introducing a peculiar way of thinking that is difficult to translate into English. One example is the translation of the word "wish". In the ancient Greek, Plato is using that word with connotations of how the object affects us, and not just the immediate pleasure. So, for example, one cannot "wish" for a hard drug because one cannot wish for something that harms us. But one can "desire" the affects that a hard drug gives the user. Thus, when someone does something they think offers them some gain but hurts their souls, they are not doing what they wish. From then on, the reader understands that peculiarity of Plato's writing when they come across the word "wish". The text would be incomprehensible without that note, and I'm glad to have read the essays. That is just one example, but the essays are this helpful in general." Alex by Amazon
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