The Oxford Handbook of Plato

The Oxford Handbook of Plato

Plato is the best known, and continues to be the most widely studied, of all the ancient Greek philosophers. The twenty-one commissioned articles in The Oxford Handbook of Plato provide in-depth and up-to-date discussions of a variety of topics and dialogues. The result is a useful state-of-the-art reference to the man many consider the most important philosophical thinker in history. Each article is an original contribution from a leading scholar, and they all serve several functions at once: they survey the lay of the land; express and develop the authors' own views; and situate those views within a range of alternatives. This Handbook contains chapters on metaphysics, epistemology, love, language, ethics, politics, art and education. Individual chapters are devoted to each of the following dialogues: the Republic, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, and Philebus. There are also chapters on Plato and the dialogue form; on Plato in his time and place; on the history of the Platonic corpus; on Aristotle's criticism of Plato, and on Plato and Platonism. "The volume's greatest strength is its evenness: with few exceptions, the articles are pitched at the same level as one another, rendering the pieces equally accessible to their audience. Another strength is its thoroughness: it appears to leave no real topical stone unturned in its efforts to acquaint the reader with Plato and Platonic scholarship." -- Philosophy in Review "Evokes new ideas and challenges to readers of Plato." -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "[T]he collection succeeds remarkably well in offering fresh perspectives on a number of themes in Plato's work while avoiding excessive scholarly wrangling or overly technical discussions of individual passages.... the collection accomplishes what should be its primary purpose -- turning readers toward Plato with a fresh set of interpretive perspectives and questions for further exploration." -- Bryn Mawr Classical Review Brand new essays on the most important philosophical thinker in history Gail Fine is Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University and Senior research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. She is the author of On Ideas and Plato on Knowledge and Forms: Selected Essays , and the editor of Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology and of Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion and the Soul , both in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series.