Plato's Philosophers

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 H. 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 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.

ISBN 0226993353   Pages 896 ISBN13 9780226993355 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher The University of Chicago Press   Weight (grammes) 1315 Imprint University of Chicago Press   Published in Chicago, IL Format Hardback   Height (mm) 229 Publication date 02 Jun 2009   Width (mm) 152 Library of Congress 2008043514   Spine width (mm) 56 DEWEY 184   Academic level General, Further/Higher education DEWEY edition DC22

Introduction		Platonic Dramatology		1
Pt. I		The Political and Philosophical Problems
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		205
Pt. II		Two Paradigms of Philosophy
5		Socrates' Positive Teaching		281
6		Timaeus Critias: Completing or Challenging Socratic Political Philosophy		420
7		Socratic Practice		482
		Conclusion to Part II		586
Pt. III		The Trial and Death of Socrates
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

"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"

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