After Plato

After Plato redefines the relationships of rhetoric for scholars, teachers, and students of rhetoric and writing in the twenty-first century. Featuring essays by some of the most accomplished scholars in the field, the book explores the diversity of ethical perspectives animating contemporary writing studies—including feminist, postmodern, transnational, non-Western, and virtue ethics—and examines the place of ethics in writing classrooms, writing centers, writing across the curriculum programs, prison education classes, and other settings. When truth is subverted, reason is mocked, racism is promoted, and nationalism takes center stage, teachers and scholars of writing are challenged to articulate the place of rhetorical ethics in the writing classroom and throughout the field more broadly. After Plato demonstrates the integral place of ethics in writing studies and provides a roadmap for future conversations about ethical rhetoric that will play an essential role in the vitality of the field. Contributors: Fred Antczak, Patrick W. Berry, Vicki Tolar Burton, Rasha Diab, William Duffy, Norbert Elliot, Gesa E. Kirsch, Don J. Kraemer, Paula Mathieu, Robert J. Mislevy, Michael A. Pemberton, James E. Porter, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Xiaoye You, Bo Wang

Despite its foundational role in the history of philosophy, Plato’s famous argument that art does not have access to truth or knowledge is now rarely examined, in part because recent philosophers have assumed that Plato’s challenge was resolved long ago. In Art and Truth after Plato, Tom Rockmore argues that Plato has in fact never been satisfactorily answered—and to demonstrate that, he offers a comprehensive account of Plato’s influence through nearly the whole history of Western aesthetics. Rockmore offers a cogent reading of the post-Platonic aesthetic tradition as a series of responses to Plato’s position, examining a stunning diversity of thinkers and ideas. He visits Aristotle’s Poetics, the medieval Christians, Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Hegel’s phenomenology, Marxism, social realism, Heidegger, and many other works and thinkers, ending with a powerful synthesis that lands on four central aesthetic arguments that philosophers have debated. More than a mere history of aesthetics, Art and Truth after Plato presents a fresh look at an ancient question, bringing it into contemporary relief.

This book sheds new light on Plato's cosmology in relation to Greek religion by examining the contested distinction between the traditional and cosmic gods. A close reading of the later dialogues shows that the two families of gods are routinely deployed to organise and structure Plato's accounts of the origins of the universe and of humanity and its social institutions, and to illuminate the moral and political ideals of philosophical utopias. Vilius Bartninkas argues that the presence of the two kinds of gods creates a dynamic, yet productive, tension in Plato's thinking which is unmistakable and which is not resolved until the works of his students. Thus the book closes by exploring how the cosmological and religious ideas of Plato's later dialogues resurfaced in the Early Academy and how the debates initiated there ultimately led to the collapse of this theological distinction.

Table of contents

This volume deals with the appropriations, criticism and transformation of Plato’s and Aristotle’s positions about theory, practice and the contemplative life, including their epistemological and metaphysical foundations, from Theophrastus to the end of Antiquity (including Jewish and Christian authors).

The Republic is Plato's most famous work and one of the seminal texts of Western philosophy and politics. The characters in this Socratic dialogue - including Socrates himself - discuss whether the just or unjust man is happier. They are the philosopher-kings of imagined cities and they also discuss the nature of philosophy and the soul among other things.

Thanks to the publication of Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, George Groves was renowned as "the greatest nineteenth-century Plato scholar". In the reface to this book, the author says, he's chosen the characters of Plato and Socrates, as they are interesting and important characters in philosophy and history. The personality of Socrates has become legendary. Yet, the period of his greatest achievement coincided with work and life od other important philosophers. This book tells about important leaders of thought from the Socrates circles: Xenophon, Kriton, Protagoras, Parmenides, Menon and others. It may be used an as supplementary source for learning philosophy and for individual research on the history of philosophy. According to the author, this book is a sequel and supplement to his major opus "The History of Greece."

Of all Plato’s dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents an illuminating new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology. Scolnicov shows that in the Parmenides Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In Scolnicov's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues. Scolnicov’s analysis is crisp and lucid, offering a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how Scolnicov’s interpretation emerges from the text. This volume will provide a valuable introduction and framework for understanding a dialogue that continues to generate lively discussion today.