In this international and interdisciplinary collection of critical essays, distinguished contributors examine a crucial premise of traditional readings of Plato's dialogues: that Plato's own doctrines and arguments can be read off the statements made in the dialogues by Socrates and other leading characters. The authors argue in general and with reference to specific dialogues, that no character should be taken to be Plato's mouthpiece. This is essential reading for students and scholars of Plato.

This article updates “The State of the Question in the Study of Plato” (Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1996) based on research covering the years from 1995–2015. Its three major parts examine: (1) how the mid‐twentieth‐century consensus has fared, (2) whether the new trends identified in that article have continued, and (3) identify trends either new or missed in the original article. On the whole, it shows the continuing decline of dogmatic and nondramatic Plato interpretation and the expansion and ramification of (...) the more literary, dramatic, and nondogmatic “new Platonism.” What was a growing insurgency twenty years ago can now be described as a, if not the, dominant approach. (shrink)

This comprehensive reference guide includes over 140 entries on every aspect of Plato's thought.

An extensive scholarly literature, written in the past century holds that in ancient Greek and Roman thought history is understood as circular and repetitive - a consequence of their anti-temporal metaphysics - in contrast with Judaeo-Christian thought, which sees history as linear and unique - a consequence of their messianic and hence radically temporal theology. Gerald Press presents a more general view - that the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian cultures were fundamentally alien and opposed cultural forces and that, therefore, Christianity's victory (...) over paganism included the replacement or supersession of one intellectual world by another - and then shows that, contrary to this view, there was substantial continuity between "pagan" and Christian ideas of history in antiquity, rather than a striking opposition between cyclic and linear patterns. He finds that the foundation of the Christian view of history as goal-directed lies in the rhetorical rather than the theological motives of early Christian writers. (shrink)

An extensive scholarly literature, written in the past century holds that in ancient Greek and Roman thought history is understood as circular and repetitive - a consequence of their anti-temporal metaphysics - in contrast with Judaeo-Christian thought, which sees history as linear and unique - a consequence of their messianic and hence radically temporal theology. Gerald Press presents a more general view - that the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian cultures were fundamentally alien and opposed cultural forces and that, therefore, Christianity's victory (...) over paganism included the replacement or supersession of one intellectual world by another - and then shows that, contrary to this view, there was substantial continuity between "pagan" and Christian ideas of history in antiquity, rather than a striking opposition between cyclic and linear patterns. He finds that the foundation of the Christian view of history as goal-directed lies in the rhetorical rather than the theological motives of early Christian writers. (shrink)

An extensive scholarly literature, written in the past century holds that in ancient Greek and Roman thought history is understood as circular and repetitive - a consequence of their anti-temporal metaphysics - in contrast with Judaeo-Christian thought, which sees history as linear and unique - a consequence of their messianic and hence radically temporal theology. Gerald Press presents a more general view - that the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian cultures were fundamentally alien and opposed cultural forces and that, therefore, Christianity's victory (...) over paganism included the replacement or supersession of one intellectual world by another - and then shows that, contrary to this view, there was substantial continuity between "pagan" and Christian ideas of history in antiquity, rather than a striking opposition between cyclic and linear patterns. He finds that the foundation of the Christian view of history as goal-directed lies in the rhetorical rather than the theological motives of early Christian writers. (shrink)

For most of the twentieth century, interpreters of Plato took little interest in the dramatic aspects of the dialogues, assumed Plato's teachings were directly expressed by their leading speakers, and sought to understand prima facie absences and inconsistencies among apparent teachings through a developmental picture of Plato's thought. Rarely did they explain why Plato occasionally used philosophical characters as different from each other and from Socrates as Parmenides, Timaeus, and the Eleatic Stranger, leaving Socrates present but largely silent. Nor did (...) they address why, having returned Socrates to leadership in the "late" Philebus, Plato eliminated him altogether in favor of an Athenian Stranger in the .. (shrink)

Unlike many other dialogues, Plato’s Charmides has never elicited much sustained scholarly attention, even though it focuses on an important moral excellence, sôphrosunê (temperance, moderation), features two of Plato’s relatives who were members of the oligarchic government of 304–303 BC, and includes two refutations of the Republic’s formula, “doing one’s own things,” as well as a long, complex discussion of “knowledge of knowledge.” The present work is therefore a welcome addition to the small collection of English books on it (Tuckey, (...) Plato’s Charmides; Hyland, The Virtue of Philosophy; Schmid, Plato’s Charmides and the Socratic Ideal of Rationality). Early chapters, comprising nearly half the .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 151 nuanced and cannot adequately be discussed in this short note. But we can say that Haar repreatedly comes back to phrases such as "a latent sketchof artistic configurations " (196), and a "secret outline of forms" (216) when describing the earth (both in the artwork and the world of artistic existence) as the origin and substructure of human, linguistic existence. Though Haar finds ample support in (...) Heidegger's writings, one is nevertheless led to wonder: What is the ontological status of this latent articulation immanent in earth? In what sense can earth be transepochal, ahistorical, if it contains such articulations to which the poet, artist, and thinker respond? How is the ahistorical/prelinguistic song from the earth to be compared to the historical/linguistic song about the earth? One must finally ask if the graceful and thoughtful prose Haar has given us is, as he hopes, a resonance of the former, or a spontaneous production of the latter. The success of Haar's insightful exposition of the ahistorical substructure of existence stands and falls on the answer to these questions. REGINALD LILLY Universityof New Hampshire Richard McKeon. Rhetoric: Essays in Invention and Ducovery. Edited with an Introduction by Mark Backman. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1987. Pp. xxxii + 22o. $25.00. 'History of philosophy' is an ambiguous term. It has been applied to doxography, a history of doctrines apart from their systematic relations or context. It has been applied to rational reconstructions of what a thinker must have meant apart from whether the thinker ever said it and from the context that provides checks on possible interpretations, rational or not. And it has been applied to contextual interpretations, which set philosophers and philosophies in the context of the language, history, and culture that condition them. Richard McKeon practiced the history of philosophy (or of thought, a phrase he sometimes prefers) in a different way: in terms of the subject matters thinkers treat and the functions they try to perform under the rubric of philosophy (rhetoric, poetry, grammar, and so on). Thus it is a history of changing definitions and differing conceptions, and of the spread of intellectual devices and ideas from realm to realm and from age to age. McKeon's kind of history is based on the observation that the terms we use--the names of our arts and sciences and the concepts employed in them--are stable but ambiguous. Thus it might be called a semantic history. It is also based on the insight, explained in the concluding essay, "A Philosopher Meditates on Discovery," that the truth is one, though it can be expressed in many different ways. And his history is consciously intended to provide both theoretical clarifications and insights and practical guidance in the resolution of contemporary problems. McKeon's work has not been widely influential in philosophy, although he is considered a major figure in the recent "renaissance of rhetoric" to which this volume primarily directs itself. However, despite the title, the selection of articles reprinted, and the 152 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28: I JANUARY ~99 o editor's emphasis on the term 'rhetoric' rather than 'philosophy', these essays can well be read--in roughly the reverse of their present order--as the discovery, illustration, and application of what McKeon calls his "new philosophy" (120). It is a philosophy built on the notions of"historical semantics" and "philosophic semantics" (218-20) and aiming to reunite philosophy and rhetoric, wisdom and eloquence, theory and practice. In the concluding essay, he describes his own intellectual development and the complex matrix of subject matters, methods, principles, and aims that can be used to characterize philosophic positions unambiguously despite their ambiguous use of common terms.' The system of historical semantics is illustrated by the two preceding essays. "Rhetoric in the Middle Ages," a tour de force of medieval scholarship and famous among medievalists and historians of rhetoric, shows how rhetoric affected not only rhetoricians, but also philosophers, theologians, and logicians from Augustine into the Renaissance. "Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century" presents the varying conceptions of the two disciplines and the oscillation in their relations from identity to antithesis. In "Symbols, Myths, and... (shrink)

Gerald A. Press - Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 167-168 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Gerald A. Press Hunter College and City University of New York Graduate Center James Lesher, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield, editors. Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2006. Pp. xi + 446. Paper, $29.95. Plato's Symposium has been a (...) fertile source of philosophical, literary, and artistic inspiration for more than two thousand years. It continues to inspire debates amid the changing fashions in contemporary Plato interpretation. This volume of papers, which grew out of a conference at the Center for Hellenic Studies in 2005, is divided into four parts. Most of the papers are richly rewarding, but there is space here to do little more than hint at their main points. Part I, "The Symposium and.. (shrink)

For fifteen years, the authors have been working together on what they call, following the convention established by Gregory Vlastos and his associates, "Socratic philosophy." The project of Socratic philosophy is to reconstruct and assess the philosophic beliefs, doctrines, and arguments of Socrates from rigorous examination of Plato's early dialogues. Whereas Vlastos and others have believed that the philosophy so extracted is that of the historical Socrates, Brickhouse and Smith "are agnostic about whose philosophy is accurately represented in Plato's early (...) dialogues" ; and their more particular contribution to the discussion has been to argue, again in contrast to others who work on Socratic philosophy, that a consistent philosophy can be derived from the plain sense of the words, without either convicting Socrates of logical blunders or having recourse to irony, humor, or any other literary or dramatic mode of explanation. Thus they are rebels in the Socratic philosophy society. This is their second jointly authored monograph, and, like Socrates on Trial, it builds on a number of jointly authored articles. (shrink)

Gerald A. Press - Virtue in the Cave: Moral Inquiry in Plato's Meno - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4 535-536 Book Review Virtue in the Cave: Moral Inquiry in Plato's Roslyn Weiss. Virtue in the Cave: Moral Inquiry in Plato's Meno. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. x + 229. Cloth, $39.95. Few monographs have been written on the Meno in English; and much of what is written takes a piecemeal (...) approach, emphasizing the dilemma about the impossibility of learning what one doesn't know, the slave boy sequence, knowledge as recollection, concepts of teaching and learning, or right opinion which is sometimes taken as being asserted by Socrates or Plato. Weiss's book has a lot to recommend it. It is the first monographic study on this dialogue in English since Sternfeld and Zyskind's in 1978. Like Weiss's earlier Socrates Dissatisfied ,.. (shrink)

Book Reviews James c. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith, eds., Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 1992. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. ~8o. Cloth, $65.oo. The modern debate about how to interpret Plato and his dialogues has been going on at least since Schleiermacher argued for the interpretive importance of literary and dramatic characteristics, against the prevailing practice of reading Platonic doctrines directly out of the texts as if they were disguised treatises (...) 9 Important contributions to the discussion earlier in the twentieth century were made by Schaerer and Gold- schmidt, Friedl~inder, Stefanini, Woodbridge and Randall, Strauss, Kr~imer and Gaiser, and the disciples of these scholars, although you would hardly know it from the present volume. For those who are new to the discussion, and especially for those who come from the.. (shrink)

The predominant scholarly opinion argues that, for the ancients, the idea of history held no meaning because time was regarded as a circular pattern in which events are repeated. Only human thought and art were meaningful. This opinion, however, is based on an a priori definition of history as the whole temporal process. If the term "history" is examined from the standpoint of its use during antiquity, the analyses of the notions of time and history change. Rather than being regarded (...) as circular and repetitious, time had no pattern at all. Though this concept posed some philosophical problems for ancient thinkers, including Aristotle, time was not discussed as a medium of history. The interest in history as an academic discipline and its view as a linear process with an origin and an end independent of human thought occurred only with the gradual and rhetorical transition to Judaeo-Christian belief. (shrink)

Book Reviews James c. Klagge and Nicholas D. Smith, eds., Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 1992. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. ~8o. Cloth, $65.oo. The modern debate about how to interpret Plato and his dialogues has been going on at least since Schleiermacher argued for the interpretive importance of literary and dramatic characteristics, against the prevailing practice of reading Platonic doctrines directly out of the texts as if they were disguised treatises (...) 9 Important contributions to the discussion earlier in the twentieth century were made by Schaerer and Gold- schmidt, Friedl~inder, Stefanini, Woodbridge and Randall, Strauss, Kr~imer and Gaiser, and the disciples of these scholars, although you would hardly know it from the present volume. For those who are new to the discussion, and especially for those who come from the... (shrink)

I agree with the substance of Prof. Byrd’s argument, that what she calls ‘summoners’ are to be found in supposedly ‘early’ as well as supposedly ‘middle’ dialogues and that this serves to undermine the strong Vlastos thesis of a radical difference between those groups. But Vlastosian and other forms of developmentalism have been in retreat for some time. I think the term παρακαλοῦντα is better translated as ‘provocations’; and I would argue that they are to be found in all of (...) Plato’s dialogues and that their presence supports a more deeply uni-tarian approach than Byrd explicitly offers here. On the other hand, provocation is only a pedagogical strategy and, although its presence constitutes a kind of unity across the Platonic corpus, the problem developmentalism was intended to solve—apparent inconsistencies and contradictions between views apparently asserted in various dialogues—remains in need of solution. (shrink)

Gerald A. Press - Platon: Penseur du visuel - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.3 487-488 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Gerald A. Press Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center Michail Maiatsky. Platon: Penseur du visuel. Commentaires philosophiques. Paris: l'Harmattan, 2005. Pp. 299. €25.50. Recent philosophers and cultural critics have written a new chapter in the long history of anti-Platonism, making Plato the evil genius (...) of a visual prejudice allegedly infecting the heart of Western metaphysics. Some find it contradictory that Plato expresses anti-visual thoughts but seems nevertheless deeply pro-visual; thus, his frequent use of visual language confuses his project. Others (the present reviewer.. (shrink)