Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Plato the Teacher
In this unique and important book, William Altman shines a light on the pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his ability to create living discourses that directly address the student. Reviving an ancient concern with reconstructing the order in which Plato intended his dialogues to be taught as opposed to determining the order in which he wrote them, Altman breaks with traditional methods by reading Plato’s dialogues as a multiplex but coherent curriculum in which the Allegory of the Cave occupies the central place. His reading of Plato's Republic challenges the true philosopher to choose the life of justice exemplified by Socrates and Cicero by going back down into the Cave of political life for the sake of the greater Good.
The Relay Race of Virtue
The ancient view that Plato and Xenophon were rivals at least had the merit of allowing them to respond to each other; in modern times, the view that Plato wrote first eliminates the possibility of an exchange between the only two Socratics whose writings are preserved intact. Challenging the chronological assumptions on which Plato's across-the-board priority currently rests, the purpose of The Relay Race of Virtue is to show that Plato and Xenophon were responding to each other and that we can gain a greater appreciation for both by recognizing the back-and-forth nature of their friendly dialogue. Instead of regarding Xenophon as Plato's inept copyist, William H. F. Altman presents him as first blazing the trail for his fellow Socratic and then learning from Plato in return. By emphasizing "Plato's Debts to Xenophon," Altman is charitable to both, justifying Socrates' belief (Memorabilia 1.2.8) "that those of his companions who adopted his principles of conduct would throughout life be good friends to him and to each other."
Ascent to the Beautiful
With Ascent to the Beautiful, William H. F. Altman completes his five-volume reconstruction of the Reading Order of the Platonic dialogues. This book covers Plato’s elementary dialogues, grappling from the start with F. D. E. Schleiermacher, who created an enduring prejudice against the works Plato wrote for beginners. Recognized in antiquity as the place to begin, Alcibiades Major was banished from the canon but it was not alone: with the exception of Protagoras and Symposium, Schleiermacher rejected as inauthentic all seven of the dialogues this book places between them. In order to prove their authenticity, Altman illuminates their interconnections and shows how each prepares the studen...
The German Stranger
Leo Strauss's connection with Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt suggests a troubling proximity to National Socialism but a serious critique of Strauss must begin with F. H. Jacobi. While writing his dissertation on this apparently Christian opponent of the Enlightenment, Strauss discovered the tactical principles that would characterize his lifework: writing between the lines, a faith-based critique of rationalism, the deliberate secularization of religious language for irreligious purposes, and an "all or nothing" antagonism to middling solutions. Especially the latter is distinctive of his Zionist writings in the 1920s where Strauss engaged in an ongoing polemic against Cultural Zionism, a...
The Guardians in Action
If you’ve ever wondered why Plato staged Timaeus as a kind of sequel to Republic, or who its unnamed missing fourth might be; or why he joined Critias to Timaeus, and whether or not that strange dialogue is unfinished; or what we should make of the written critique of writing in Phaedrus, and of that dialogue’s apparent lack of unity; or what is the purpose of the long discussion of the One in the second half of Parmenides, and how it relates to the objections made to the Theory of Forms in its first half; or if the revisionists or unitarians are right about Philebus, and why its Socrates seems less charming than usual, or whether or not Cratylus takes place after Euthyphro, and whether ...
Ascent to the Good
At the crisis of his Republic, Plato asks us to imagine what could possibly motivate a philosopher to return to the Cave voluntarily for the benefit of others and at the expense of her own personal happiness. This book shows how Plato has prepared us, his students, to recognize that the sun-like Idea of the Good is an infinitely greater object of serious philosophical concern than what is merely good for me, and thus why neither Plato nor his Socrates are eudaemonists, as Aristotle unquestionably was. With the transcendent Idea of Beauty having been made manifest through Socrates and Diotima, the dialogues between Symposium and Republic—Lysis, Euthydemus, Laches, Charmides, Gorgias, Theage...
Plato and Demosthenes
Universally regarded as Plato’s student in antiquity, it is the eloquent and patriotic orator Demosthenes—not the pro-Macedonian Aristotle who tutored Alexander the Great—who returned to the dangerous Cave of political life, and thus makes it possible to recover the Old Academy. In Plato and Demosthenes: Recovering the Old Academy, William H. F. Altman explores how Demosthenes—along with Phocion, Lycurgus, and Hyperides—add external and historical evidence for the hypothesis that Plato’s brilliant and challenging dialogues constituted the Academy’s original curriculum. Altman rejects the facile view that the eloquent Plato, a master speech-writer as well as the proponent of the transcendent and post-eudaemonist Idea of the Good, was rhetoric’s enemy. He shows how Demosthenes acquired the discipline necessary to become a great orator, first by shouting at the sea and then by summoning the Athenians to self-sacrifice in defense of their waning freedom. Demosthenes thus proved Socrates’ criticism of democracy and the democratic man wrong, just as Plato the Teacher had intended that his best students would, and as he continues to challenge us to do today.
The Guardians on Trial
Based on a conception of Reading Order introduced and developed in his Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington; 2012) and The Guardians in Action: Plato the Teacher and the Post-Republic Dialogues from Timaeus to Theaetetus (Lexington; 2016), William H. F. Altman now completes his study of Plato’s so-called “late dialogues” by showing that they include those that depict the trial and death of Socrates. According to Altman, it is not Order of Composition but Reading Order that makes Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo “late dialogues,” and he shows why Plato’s decision to interpolate the notoriously “late” Sophist and Statesman between Euthyphro ...
Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason
A prolific philosopher who also held Rome's highest political office, Cicero was uniquely qualified to write on political philosophy. In this book Professor Atkins provides a fresh interpretation of Cicero's central political dialogues - the Republic and Laws. Devoting careful attention to form as well as philosophy, Atkins argues that these dialogues together probe the limits of reason in political affairs and explore the resources available to the statesman given these limitations. He shows how Cicero appropriated and transformed Plato's thought to forge original and important works of political philosophy. The book demonstrates that Cicero's Republic and Laws are critical for understanding the history of the concepts of rights, the mixed constitution and natural law. It concludes by comparing Cicero's thought to the modern conservative tradition and argues that Cicero provides a perspective on utopia frequently absent from current philosophical treatments.
The Revival of Platonism in Cicero's Late Philosophy
Less than two years before his murder, Cicero created a catalogue of his philosophical writings that included dialogues he had written years before, numerous recently completed works, and even one he had not yet begun to write, all arranged in the order he intended them to be read, beginning with the introductory Hortensius, rather than in accordance with order of composition. Following the order of the De divinatione catalogue, William H. F. Altman considers each of Cicero’s late works as part of a coherent philosophical project determined throughout by its author’s Platonism. Locating the parallel between Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Cicero’s “Dream of Scipio” at the center...
