eBook - PDF
Ascent to the Good
The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues from Symposium to Republic
- 661 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
Ascent to the Good
The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues from Symposium to Republic
About this book
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, Theages, Meno, and Cleitophon— prepare the reader to make the final leap into Platonism, a soul-stirring idealism that presupposes the student's inborn awareness that there is nothing just, noble, or beautiful about maximizing one's own good. While perfectly capable of making the majority of his readers believe that he endorses the harmless claim that it is advantageous to be just and thus that we will always fare well by doing well, Plato trains his best students to recognize the deliberate fallacies and shortcuts that underwrite these claims, and thus to look beyond their own happiness by the time they reach the Allegory of the Cave, the culmination of a carefully prepared Ascent to the Good.
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Ascent to the Good by William H. F. Altman in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Ascent to the Good
- Ascent to the Good: The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues from Symposium to Republic
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Socrates
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Bibliography
- Index
- Index verborum
- Index locorum
- About the Author