Musings on Plato's Symposium

by Alex Priou

A guide to understanding love, and the love of understanding. In Musings on Plato's Symposium, Alex Priou offers a holistic interpretation of Plato's seminal work on love. An insightful commentary presented in short, aphoristic sections, the book is both a way into the depths of the dialogue for serious students, and a philosophical challenge for experts. Inspired by Plato's own mixture of the playful, prankish, flirtatious, outrageous, and beyond, the book is incisive and innovative in style and substance alike, and it rewards those who wish to approach the mysteries of Plato's Symposium and its ultimate the meaning of love in its many forms.

Genres: Philosophy

116 pages, Paperback

Published August 10, 2023

Reviews

[Alan Johnson]

ALEX PRIOU’S MUSINGS ON PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM

I have just now downloaded on Kindle Alex Priou’s recently published Musings on Plato’s Symposium. Priou is a political philosophy professor. What appears to be an excellent review by Eric Adler of Priou’s book can be found at https://www.academia.edu/107696077/Er.... Eric Adler is a professor and the current chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Maryland. Among other things, Adler writes:

In a series of 49 brief chapterlets, Priou provides a deep dive into Western culture's most profound dialogue on the nature of love. Written in an aphoristic style that recalls Nietzsche, the book is chock-a-block with bold and whimsical flourishes. In substance, however, Priou's reflections on the dialogue seldom strike the reader as particularly Nietzschean. The book's brief preface announces its author's indebtedness to the Straussian tradition-more specifically, to the views on Plato's Symposium previously articulated by Leo Strauss and Seth Bernadete. Although in places one can detect its Straussian bona fides, Priou's Musings on Plato's Symposium should be a valuable companion for readers of various intellectual inclinations. . . .

Priou routinely introduces issues that qualify the dialogue–issues that other readers are likely to have missed or failed to notice adequately, either because they lack Priou's philosophical training or did not read the dialogue with sufficient attention and care. He casts a gimlet eye on the Symposium, spurring the reader to examine Plato's work with greater insight and, in many places, suspicion. As enamored with Plato as Priou obviously is, he's no colorless and passive cheerleader for a great work.

Referring to an 1897 article by Harvard professor Irving Babbit, Adler remarks:

As even a quick glance at some recent issues of peer-reviewed classics journals will attest, the tendency of classicists to focus their scholarly attention on minutiae of little interest to non-specialists has only intensified in the decades since Babbitt penned his essay. Thanks in large measure to the pseudo-scientific manner in which most contemporary classicists are forced to write, many academic books and articles on the ancient Greeks and Romans seem positively reader-proof.

Adler exempts Priou from this judgment, concluding that “[i]f more scholars wrote like Priou, perhaps a revival of the humanities in American culture would seem less farfetched.”

October 16, 2023 Note: I have now finished reading Alex Priou’s Musings on Plato’s Symposium. Priou’s interpretative “musings” go deeply into the text and action of the dialogue. It has been about twenty years since I last read the Symposium and Leo Strauss’s edited 1959 lectures on it ( On Plato’s Symposium). Informed by Strauss’s analysis, Priou provides additional illuminating comments, especially in the second half of his Musings and most especially in the last section of it, where he discusses his interpretation of Plato’s own understanding of the purposes of his dialogues.

[Jennifer Gavin]

Outstanding. Sharp, insightful, and warm-hearted. A highly reflective and enjoyable book.

[Will Spohn]

I lacked the time to do a slow and thorough read-through, but these musings are insightful and yet not too insightful, that is, they leave room for the reader to think. For someone like myself, who all too eagerly swarms like bees to honey secondary texts on Plato (since I am too dull to make much progress myself), this is very helpful. Priou’s style is also very sharp and amusing (the stylistic influence of Nietzsche is noticeable—but in a good way). Well worth the read.

[Beto Neira]

I find Priou's comments on Plato the best ones out there. Short but really insightful; read it just like the air I breathe.