Which plato book should i read first

Such a holistic approach to Plato was, and is still, characteristic of continental European interpretation; indeed, it has been taken for granted.

Anglophone interpreters, by contrast, have since the first half of the twentieth century 6 tended to favor splitting the works into three groups, broadly identified as early, middle, and late and differing significantly in substance and content.

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But one may legitimately doubt whether there is any such thing as a distinctive middle metaphysics at all. There is so much controversy about how Platonic forms are to be understood, at any period, that any reconstruction of supposed metaphysical developments in Plato is to be regarded as at best speculative. It is also a matter of dispute whether Plato ever definitively broke away from the kind of moral psychology attributed by Aristotle to Socrates or, if he did, when exactly the break occurred.

Following Ancient Models of Interpretation. One might have thought that Aristotle would have at least some advantage over us, since he was actually taught by Plato in the original Academy and presumably knew him fairly well. But, if so, he may be said—from our point of view—to have squandered any such advantage, by preferring philosophical conversation with his teacher, alive or dead, over simple reporting, if indeed that had ever been possible.

Herein may lie the heart of the problem for any interpreter of Plato. It may actually be the case that Plato never gave a straightforward exposition of the detail of his views, in propria persona , in public or in private—either because he never felt certain enough about them; or because the most important of them were not easily expressible or not expressible at all; or for some other reason, for example that he thought people or that selection of people that would constitute his audience needed ultimately to make up their own minds about important subjects, rather than just being told what to think.

Things might solidify for a time, so giving us the Middle Academy, the New Academy, Middle Platonism or Neoplatonism, Cambridge Platonism, and so on—right down to the time when Plato ceases to be someone to be followed and becomes instead an object for investigation by scholars or students of philosophy or literature. But no such form of Platonism, even the earliest, could count as more authentic than any other. Or, if proximity were to count for something, pride of place should presumably go to the Old Academy, then the Middle Platonists.

And that in itself suggests that these later figures too are all occupied in the same exercise as we are; that is, that they too are trying to second-guess Plato, rather than utilizing any specialized knowledge about him.

That conclusion extends, a fortiori , to the Neoplatonists, working centuries later. In comparison with their Platonist predecessors, they are great innovators. Most important, they introduce a first principle of everything including forms and intellect , which is either—in the case of the founding figure, Plotinus—an absolutely simple One, or, for Iamblichus, something even superior to that.

For such innovations, they appeal directly to the dialogues: the Republic and, above all, the second, puzzling part of the Parmenides. But they are also open to Aristotelian and Stoic ideas.

As much as it is an interpretation of Plato, Neoplatonism takes him, and Platonism, further. Plotinus, in particular, is best understood as a philosopher in his own right, within a Platonic tradition. That is not, however, how the Neoplatonists were understood by the vast majority of readers during the following thousand years, for whom Neoplatonic texts and readings were, with few exceptions, more readily available than the dialogues themselves.

From then on, Neoplatonic readings tended to be displaced by the idea, now almost universally accepted, that Plato was properly to be understood from his own dialogues, not from or through anyone else.

It is extraordinary, given how obvious that idea may seem to us, how recent in origin it is. But underlying its emergence is a much more significant switch: from using Plato as a source of ideas to think with to treating him as an object of study. The dominance of Neoplatonic interpretations is a measure of the degree to which Plato, through the medium of Plotinus and others, continued to be the writer to think with, helping to generate new traditions of ideas as he was transplanted to different soils.

And he continued to hold that position, up to a point, even in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Neoplatonists, and probably the Middle Platonists before them, had clear views on the order in which the dialogues should be read.

Such orderings often entailed casualties, in the form of the athetization of dialogues that failed to fit the emerging pattern. But the firmest conclusion reached, mainly on stylometric grounds, 14 was that the corpus could be divided into three groups: the last group containing Timaeus, Critias, Philebus, Sophist, Statesman, and Laws ; the penultimate group Phaedrus, Republic, Parmenides, and Theaetetus ; and the earliest all the rest. But that, though still widely accepted, is now also as thoroughly contested a view as that there was a decisive break between the chronologically first and second groups of dialogues.

If we knew for certain that Plato underwent radical changes of mind, then knowing in which order he wrote his works might well have implications for the order in which they should be read; but if, for all we know, his fundamental ideas remained the same, then the order of composition of the dialogues may be of little more than incidental interest.

Still other approaches have been tried and seen to fail. Modern Philosophers as the Inheritors of the Neoplatonic Mantle? The only modern interpreters who even partly escape this characterization are those who bring with them to their reading of Plato the baggage of their own philosophical traditions.

In the post-idealist continental European tradition, an example like Gadamer tends also to be the exception, since by and large that tradition has taken an anti-Platonic and anti-Platonist turn. The process began, in earnest, in the second half of the twentieth century, with the recognition that Plato in the Theaetetus and the Sophist seemed to have at least partly anticipated ideas of current interest to philosophers, and then grew into a larger project.

This project has two parts. But the second and more adventurous part consists of using the armory of analytically inspired techniques and distinctions in order to make the best philosophical sense, consistent with the context, of passages and ideas that, taken as they stand, may appear bizarre or just plain false.

In the best cases, the interpreter will be doing philosophy with Plato, 20 like the Neoplatonists and other premodern groups. That their agreement stems from different sources—a belief in Platonic authority in the one case, a due attachment to the principle of philosophical charity in the other—makes no difference. The Problems of Cherry-Picking. The modern analytical approach to Plato is, however, no less problematical than the Neoplatonic. Like the Neoplatonists, modern analytically trained interpreters inevitably center on particular contexts and particular issues, at the cost of neglecting the bulk not only of the dialogues but of any particular dialogue.

They have their way of dealing with this problem, as do the Neoplatonists. But neither response is satisfying: the latter for the reason given earlier, 22 that it understates the continuities between the dialogues taken as a whole, and the former because explaining any work as a preparation for more perfect levels of understanding will again inevitably involve leaving most of it out of account.

A second problem with both the Neoplatonist and the analytical approach is that their choice of contexts and issues, and indeed of dialogues, to privilege over others is too obviously dictated by their own preoccupations. What is missing in both types of interpretation is a sense of what patently drives the Platonic project 25 : a desire—rooted in a vision of how things are and what they are—to change the way in which people think and live their lives.

Taken together, these confrontations amount to a passionate critique of existing attitudes and modes of behavior and a rejection of these in favor of a different way of thinking and living. Neoplatonizing accounts catch something of the larger picture in which this critique is framed while either missing the critique itself altogether or representing it one-sidedly in terms of oppositions between soul and body, human and divine, descent and ascent.

Such oppositions clearly are Platonic, but they are at one end of a spectrum that also includes, and more frequently, a carefully reasoned, hand-to-hand engagement with people and their ideas: an engagement that presents alternatives that look to this life as much as to anything beyond it.

For their part, analytical interpreters may end up failing even more spectacularly to capture the passionate tone of the Platonic dialogues, by reducing them—at least by implication—to a locus for quasi-academic 26 argument and counterargument. The last section has implicitly proposed a compromise on another of the dividing lines between interpreters of Plato.

Ambiguities of this sort are common enough in Plato for him to become a hunting ground for hidden meanings: deprived as we are of an unambiguous message, advertised on the surface of the text, 28 it is natural enough for interpreters to go searching beneath it and find treasures there, the signs to which have been missed by less careful readers.

He contended that when society is formed, a government is set up to determine the disputes between people if these rights and duties are not obeyed and respected. Since the government exists by the consent of the people to promote the good for its citizens, any government that failed to do so should be removed. He rejected speculative philosophy and theology and all claims to truth that lay outside human experience.

The basis for knowledge, he argued, lay only in the experience of the senses. Such study, Hume argued, would provide the basis for a secular morality and for a society ruled by justice and reason. Born in Geneva in , Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a visionary and revolutionary philosopher and writer.

Rousseau asserts that the authority of the state can only be legitimate if it comes from the will of the people. Smith was an eminent Scottish moral philosopher and the founder of modern economics, best-known for his book The Wealth of Nations which was highly influential in the development of Western capitalism. In it, he outlined the theory of the division of labour and proposed the theory of laissez-faire.

Hence instead of mercantilism, Smith believed that government should not interfere in economic affairs as free trade increased wealth.

Paine was another important figure in the history of the French and American Revolutions, best known for his works, Common Sense and The American Crisis His ideas were rooted in the theories of Locke and Rousseau. Wollstonecraft saw that the prevailing pedagogical theories were turning women into feminine beings, ill-prepared for life vicissitudes.

She wanted women to become rational and independent beings, whose sense of self came from the development of their mind rather than a mirror. John Stuart Mill was one of the most influential philosophers of the nineteenth-century and an advocate of utilitarianism, a theory based on the works of Jeremy Bentham. His book On Liberty made him famous as a defender of human rights. Mill also believed that happiness was the basis for morality and encouraged any action which maximised the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people.

Mill was the leading liberal feminist of his day. He defended the rights of women on equal terms with men in The Subjection of Women and proposed measures such as votes for women. One problem with saying that is that you might say all his dialogues have a political dimension. So even if you say, OK, these are the three dialogues that explicitly treat the nature of politics and constitutions, the Republic and the Laws look much more similar. The Statesman looks very different from that.

What the Statesman is doing is asking, Is there such a thing as political expertise or political knowledge? What is it exactly that a true statesman would have to know? What would it therefore be, to be someone who knows about politics, as opposed to just knowing philosophy?

If somebody were to approach this book for the first time, should they read it from cover to cover, or are there key passages that you should focus in on? At the end of the dialogue, that knowledge-cum-skill is illustrated by trying to moderate between hawks and doves. There are people who are too bellicose and hawkish on war and people who are too dove-ish and want peace, sometimes at the wrong moment.

The statesman will be able to set up shared opinions beliefs and values and even marriages between these two groups that will moderate their views and enable them to better perceive the right moment for political action. These are being a general, being a judge and being an orator. Those were the offices that were thought of as the political offices in Greek cities at the time.

Something like that. He plays with this question. The image in the passage about the laws is, What if you had a statesman, and then they went away. What would they use writing for? But if they go away, then they have to leave little written notes and reminders, like your doctor gives you a set of written prescriptions.

People often just treat this Plato book as a critique of writing. So it can be taken out of context, it can be misunderstood, it becomes stale.

There is much more in Plato than that, obviously, but as a political thinker, is he just a fascinating figure from the past?

In this Plato book he describes how the ideal constitution might decay into a regime focused on honour — like Sparta was at the time — or into an oligarchy, or a democracy, or a tyranny. If people love money do they want acquisition or do they want consumption? One of the things Plato says in that book which is kind of amazing is how you could have a law that would stem the excesses of oligarchy, where people are too prone to lend money and impoverish the citizens. That would actually not be such a bad idea as a law.

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