Toronto Summer Seminar XIV (original) (raw)
Related papers
Plato's Laws: A Critical Guide
Journal of Hellenic Studies 132 (2012), 262-264, 2012
This is my critical book review of Christopher Bobonich (ed.), Plato’s Laws: A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 for the Journal of Hellenic Studies 132 (2012), 262-264. I was given more space than usual to provide an overview and/or critic of each of the contributions.
Introduction to Two Courses on Plato's Laws by Leo Strauss
Strauss’s encounter with the Laws was a key moment in his rediscovery of esoteric writing. This short piece introduces and situates within the body of his work the edited transcripts of two courses on Plato's Laws taught by Leo Strauss in 1959 and 1970. The transcripts are available online at https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu.
A Summary and evaluation of Plato's Laws Book X and its overall purpose within the Laws
Written in the hope that it may shed some light on what is a poorly recognised yet important piece of Ancient Greek philosophical work. This article is a summary into the Athenian interlocutor's argument into the relevance and existence of the Gods within the Ancient Greek Society as seen in Plato's Laws Book X. With specific reference to the purpose of the argument for the overall book.
Gail Fine, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Plato . Reviewed by
Philosophy in Review, 2010
Professor Fine's book (hereafter: OHP) is an intelligent contribution to the scores of team-written philosophy handbooks, guides and companions that have appeared in the last two decades. Like many of its closest counterparts-The Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992), The Blackwell Guide to Ancient Philosophy (2003), A Companion to Socrates (2006), The Blackwell Guide to Plato's Republic (2006)-OHP features newlycommissioned work by leading specialists. It comprises 21 essays examining Plato's contributions to each of ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, as well as to topics of more special concern (love, language, politics, art, education). Some essays focus upon particular dialogues (all, appropriately, from the Plato's 'middle' and 'late' periods, as opposed to his 'Socratic' period), while others are concerned with cultural and historical matters, e.g., Malcolm Schofield's, 'Plato in His Time and Place,' and Charles Brittain's account of Platonism as it emerged and developed from the period c. 100-600 AD. Fine includes a comprehensive introduction, an extensive bibliography arranged according to topics and dialogues, indexes locorum and nominum, and a subject index. In addition, each essay includes its proper bibliography.
In the past decade, the Laws have achieved a prominent position in scholarship on Plato: the number of recent monographs and collec-tions on this work is considerable. After his "Médiation et coercition. Pour une lecture des Lois de Platon" (Villeneuve d’Ascq, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2005) André Laks, a leading expert on the Laws, has now published a second monograph on the dia-logue. The new book aims to “articulate the conceptual net that the Laws weave around the term ‘law’” (p. 154), but shares with the earlier one a very similar scholarly perspective and a focus on persuasion and the preambles. The book is subdivided into an introduction, ten chapters, a summary, followed by three ap-pendices, notes, bibliography, and two indices.