Book description
When Plato set his dialogs, written texts were disseminated primarily by performance and recitation. He wrote them, however, when literacy was expanding. Jill Frank argues that there are unique insights to be gained from appreciating Plato's dialogs as written texts to be read and reread. At the center of these…
Why read it?
1 author picked Poetic Justice as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Plato speaks in the Republic of the “old quarrel between poetry and philosophy”–yet he was a writer of imaginative prose himself. This book shows how seriously Plato took poetry: how many of the crucial ideas in the dialogues grow out of Socrates’ commentary on lines of poetry from Homer, Hesiod, or other archaic Greek authors.
Jill Frank reads Plato very differently from me: she thinks that the Republic is signaling its readers to reject the political ideals that the dialogue seems to propose, in favor of the democratic authority of the individual. But while I don’t agree, I always learn…
From Melissa's list on accessible and thought-provoking books about Plato.
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