The Cambridge Companion to Plato

by Richard Kraut (Editor)

Plato stands as the fount of our philosophical tradition, being the first Western thinker to produce a body of writing that touches upon a wide range of topics still discussed by philosophers today. In a sense he invented philosophy as a distinct subject, for although many of these topics were discussed by his intellectual predecessors and contemporaries, he was the first to bring them together by giving them a unitary treatment. This volume contains fourteen new essays discussing Plato's views about knowledge, reality, mathematics, politics, ethics, love, poetry, and religion. There are also analyses of the intellectual and social background of his thought, the development of his philosophy throughout his career, the range of alternative approaches to his work, and the stylometry of his writing.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Reference, Greece, Education

574 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1992

Reviews

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was 2009, and I was neck-deep in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trying to draft a paper that wouldn’t make my professor yawn into his tweed elbow patches. Virtue, the golden mean, eudaimonia—I had all the right words but not enough soul behind them. I needed to understand where Aristotle came from. And that meant going back to his teacher. Enter: The Cambridge Companion to Plato, edited by Richard Kraut.

I still remember the bookstore—dusty, solemn, and filled with the kind of silence that only philosophy sections possess. I reached for the volume not as a student, but as a seeker. The cover was no-frills, the pages dense. But once I opened it, it felt like I had unlocked a secret dialogue behind the dialogues.

Each chapter gave me a new facet of the philosopher I thought I knew—Plato the metaphysician, Plato the political radical, Plato the poetic exile. I found essays that unpacked The Republic with surgical precision, analyses of The Symposium that made eros feel less dreamy and more divine, and a treatment of the Phaedrus that nearly made me cry over the soul’s longing for truth.

The book didn't offer comfort—it offered clarity. And sometimes, that’s the scarier gift.

In the middle of writing about Aristotle, I realised how much Plato had to say about the why behind every ought. The two were no longer just teacher and student—they were two parts of a grand intellectual duet, and I was now humming along.

That year, The Cambridge Companion to Plato didn’t just help my paper—it helped shift the furniture of my mind. It’s still on my shelf, pages dog-eared, marginalia scribbled in erasable pencil (because one must never presume too much in the realm of Ideas).

[Richard Newton · Rating 3 out of 5]

My 3 star rating reflects how useful I found this book. Individually the essays are good, but not all of them were particularly relevant to me. The first three essays are really about history and interpretation of Plato - rather than philosophy which is what I am primarily interested in.

Several of the essays are no doubt great thinking, but were on some of the less common aspects of Plato's writing. There are some very good pieces here and undoubtedly my understanding of Plato has improved significantly from reading this. If my interests were different, then I might have graded the book higher. Before choosing check the contents list - if they are relevant you may find this a very good book

[John Armstrong · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure what this book is supposed to be. It's an anthology consisting of a few "foundational" chapters on the full set of Platonic dialogs, which are fairly useful, followed by a bunch of chapters on individual dialogs which focused on particular topics most of which were centered on specific dialogs (of which there about 35 in all) and not on the dialogs as a whole but on specific issues within the dialogs. I'm not sure what the purpose the book is intended to be, but is certainly not to bring together a collection of essays by various contributors that will serve as a useful reference work for those wanting to explore the dialogs. In fact, it looks just like just another of I suspect countless conference proceeding that has some managed to get packed up as as a "Cambridge Companion to X" volume. But then again, for all I know all the entries in the "Cambridge Companion to X" are basically the same thing.

Not recommended.

[Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good collection of essays, however, Plato is the most overrated philosopher in the history of western philosophy by far.