Abstract

In The Soul of Socrates Nalin Ranasinghe seeks to “reconstruct the uncanny experience of meeting” Socrates, which has been “lost in the verdant groves of academia”, by emphasizing the philosopher’s humanity, playfulness, and resoluteness in the face of modern nihilistic challenges of “fundamentalism” and “rampant materialism”. In so doing Ranasinghe challenges several current factions in Platonic scholarship, including postmodern philosophers who merely “read Plato with a view to displaying their own cleverness and urbanity,” as well as analytical philosophers who “may interrogate the dialogues with the same rigor that they would lavish on a professional colleague, but... fail to see the dramatic unity of a dialogue”. Ranasinghe also sets himself apart from other scholars who “are keenly aware that a Platonic dialogue is as much a dramatic performance as a logical argument,” and yet whose interpretations paradoxically “lead to a very skeptical opinion of Socrates”. Taking his cues from such “giants” as Stanley Rosen, Leo Strauss, and Jacob Klein, Ranasinghe returns to several early Platonic dialogues, including the Republic, Protagoras, Phaedo, and Symposium, in order to “derive a more positive view of the human condition” and of Socrates’ way of life generally speaking. This positive view sees Socrates as a teacher of philosophic eros, which reflects a perennial tension between poros and penia, plenty and need, and is yet at the same time a “transcendental force that attunes the loving soul to the cosmos”.