Plato: A Very Short Introduction 1st Edition

I wish this book had been available when I started to read Plato (a long time ago)In a very readable and engaging style, Julia Annas presents what is known about Plato, helpful suggestions on how to approach his dialogues, and a brief summary of his important ideas and their historical significance. What more can one ask of an introduction?

Many years ago I was an undergraduate philosophy major and took my first course in Ancient Philosophy from a teacher I have always remembered. The class gave me my first academic exposure to Plato. I was deeply moved, as many of Plato's young readers have been over the centuries. My teacher encouraged my interest and suggested a study of Ancient Greek if I wanted to do serious work. I did in fact study Greek for two years. My dreams of graduate work in philosophy, of further serious study of Plato, and of an academic teaching career did not materialize. I continued to think about Plato and philosophy over the years, both while working and in retirement.Written as part of the Very Short Introduction series of Oxford University Press, "Plato: a Very Short Introduction" (2003) brought back memories of my study of Plato, of my love for the study, and for philosophy. The author, Julia Annas, is Regents Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. She has published widely on Ancient Philosophy and on Plato. The VSI series offers "concise and original introductions" to a broad range of subjects. I have learned a great deal from books in the series on subjects both unfamiliar to me and familiar, such as the thought of Plato.It is odd because I picked up this short introduction and immediately was hooked. Annas begins in medias res with the nature of knowledge in a chapter titled 'Arguing with Plato" She explores Plato's dialogue "Theaetetus", the first of Plato's dialogues I wrote about in college. Knowledge for Plato involves recollection and Annas helped me recollect. She also, within a few pages of an introductory book taught me something new. She taught me again when, later in the book, she discusses Plato's "Timaeus" and pointed out some of the consequences of the difference between Plato's God and the Jewish-Christian-Islamic God that I hadn't sufficiently noticed.Still, this book largely brought back memories of issues and things that I knew, as Annas discusses Plato's theory of knowledge, the importance of his dialogical presentation, his relationship to Socrates, his views of love, sex, and gender (the latter at too great length and somewhat polemically), the nature of individual and social virtue, the soul, and, at last the theory of forms. These are matters for a book many times the size of this VSI, but the discussion brought me back to thinking about Plato.As Annas stresses, Plato has been read many different ways over the centuries and still is today. His works are endlessly deep and fascinating. Broadly, some readers see Plato as teaching no substantive doctrine himself but rather working to instill a love of and search for truth in his readers. Others see Plato as offering strongly substantive positions on many matters. And, of course, there are many possible ways of combining both positions. Annas describes Plato, rightly so, as the first professional philosopher. Plato wrote, at the least, to make his readers think and to understand that the philosophical search differed from other forms of knowledge and that it was worth exploring and pursuing. It involved, perhaps, a search for meaning and for truth, in addition to Plato's own efforts at substantive teaching.The goal of Annas's book is not to give a detailed summary of Plato but instead to persuade readers to study him further. She writes early in her study:"What is difficult and also rewarding to bear in mind about Plato is that he is intensely concerned both with argument and with bold ideas. in a way that is subtle and hard to capture without simplification. This introduction to Plato does no pretend either to cover all of Plato's ideas, or to provide a recipe for interpreting him. but rather aims to introduce you to engagement with Plato in a way that will, I hope, lead you to persist."She concludes with the following observation: "For in the end [Plato's] deepest message is not that we should believe in Forms, or in the importance of virtue, but that we should engage with him, and with our own contemporaries, in aspiring to understand these matters."This was, for me, a highly moving book. It brought Plato back to me and reminded me of the love of philosophical thinking which, I hope, has stayed with me even though my career path took a different direction.Robin Friedman

Annas does an admirable job here considering how many counter-narratives there are about Plato and how much many fault lines there are in the scholarship. This leads to a non-intrusive and helpful introduction, but it doesn't give one solid rubric for interpretation. Annas does give a good overview of some of the seeming contradictions in Plato, particularly his very differing doctrines around the "soul" and the "forms." Annas does not try to delineate "true Plato" from "true Socrates" nor does she go through all the interpretation traditions or the sometimes contradictory biographical accounts of Plato. While some readers will be frustrated with this, a book of this length could not do this meaningfully. Annas does encourage close reading of Plato's work and gets a good background to the themes that one should notice in Plato scholarship.

I read this for a seminar but also to reacquaint myself with themes in Plato, after about seven years since I last studied his works seriously. I'd recommend it to anyone in a similar situation but not as a first introduction to Plato; for that, read the Apology and the Euthyphro.

Excellent!

I would have found this book about Plato very confusing if I hadn’t already known a lot about him. It seems very hard to get any kind of grip on him from the author since he seems sometimes to do things one way and at other times another way with no rhyme or reason concerning the change. As another reviewer noticed, her book is too fragmentary.Let me try my own very, very short introduction to Plato. The most important event in Plato’s life was the trial and execution of his teacher and friend Socrates, an event which he regarded as a monstrous miscarriage of justice. The result was an interest on his part in experts in justice and more generally, in moral experts, for had there been such experts, and had they had enough power, Socrates would not have been executed. In connection with this interest, he went through three phases: an early phase in which he was searching for, but not finding, moral experts; a middle phase in which he had figured out a way of producing moral experts – they were the ones who could contemplate the forms; and a late phase in which he was defending his theory of forms against critics.In his earliest phase, Plato had Socrates examine people like Euthyphro who claimed expertise in the moral realm. Inevitably, they were shown not to know what they were talking about.In his middle phase, Plato developed the theory of forms, which allowed him to say that moral experts are those people who could contemplate the forms. For example, someone who could contemplate the form of beauty would know what perfect beauty was like and so become an expert on beauty. In the “Republic,” he promoted the idea that those who are moral experts should be the rulers of society because they will be experts on justice and goodness. While the dialogues of the early period are inconclusive and portray a Socrates who claims ignorance, the very opposite is true of the dialogues of the middle period.In his last phase, Plato was forced to deal with critics of the forms, whose criticisms appear in the “Parmenides.” The clue that this is what is happening comes at “Parmenides” 135a3-4, where we learn that most people responded to the criticisms of the forms by concluding that forms do not exist, despite Plato’s insistence that they do exist. There followed a lengthy debate, which we can describe as The Most Important Philosophical Debate You’ve Never Heard Of. You’ve never heard of it because no one in antiquity ever stated explicitly that this debate had occurred, though it is quite obvious that it must have. This debate had its ups and downs for Plato; for example, he started two trilogies with what seems to be a high degree of confidence, but in fact finished neither of them. At the end of his life, he realized he was never going to persuade his critics that forms exist, so he wrote the “Laws,” which focuses more on setting up laws than on finding a moral expert.There. The problem of understanding Plato, for both beginners and advanced scholars, is that while each individual dialogue is usually understandable, it is hard to see how they all fit together. But we can see how they all fit together by using the framework I have provided, which is based on my assertion that Plato’s main focus his entire life was the existence of moral experts. And there is even a simple formula to remember it all: paradise sought, paradise gained, paradise lost. Paradise here is not the Garden of Eden à la John Milton, but the existence of moral experts. Plato was early on searching for, but not finding, moral experts; he then figured out a way to produce them using the theory of forms; and finally, he had to defend his theory against critics of the forms.