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This book examines ideas about personality and self in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, and the possible influence of these ideas on Greek and Roman literature. The book is subdivided into three parts. The first part focuses on the question of what is new and distinctive in the Hellenistic philosophical conception of self, especially in Stoicism and Epicureanism. A shared or converging set of ideas (the structured self) is analyzed in these two theories, centred on a combination of radical (Socratic) ethical claims and on psychophysical and psychological holism. This view of selfhood is contrasted with the non-holistic, part-based conception of personality found in the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical tradition in this period. The second part illustrates this broad contrast with special reference to the Stoic theory of passions and its critical reception by thinkers in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, such as Plutarch and Galen. It is suggested that the Stoic theory and its critics are both influenced by different strands in Plato’s thought about psychology. The third part of the book discusses theoretical issues about concepts of selfhood. It argues against the common view that Hellenistic-Roman thought shows a shift towards a subjective-individualistic notion of self. This part also considers the possible influence of the philosophical ideas discussed here on literature in this period. It identifies contrasting Platonic-Aristotelian and Stoic-Epicurean ways of thinking about collapse of character, and traces the possible influence of these patterns in Plutarch’s biography, Senecan tragedy, and Virgilian epic.

Of all Plato's dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents a new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology. The book shows that in the Parmenides, Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In the book's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues. The book's analysis offers a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how the book's interpretation emerges from the text.

This is a general introduction to Plato's political thought. It covers the main periods of Platonic thought, examining those dialogues that best show how Plato makes the city's unity the aim of politics and then makes the quest for that unity the aim of philosophy. From the psychological model (the city is like a great soul) to the physiological definition (the city is a living being), the reader can traverse the whole of Plato's oeuvre, and understand it as a political philosophy. The book is designed to be an undergraduate textbook but will also be of interest to scholars. It is an English translation of Platon et la cité, published in French by Presses Universitaires de France in 1997 as part of the series Philosophies, and offers English-speaking readers access to a more unifying continental European reading of Plato than is common in UK or North American scholarship.

Thinking of Death places Plato’s Euthydemus among the dialogues that surround the trial and death of Socrates. A premonition of philosophy’s fate arrives in the form of Socrates’ encounter with the two-headed sophist pair, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, who appear as if they are the ghost of the Socrates of Aristophanes’ thinkery. The pair vacillates between choral ode and rhapsody, as Plato vacillates between referring to them in the dual and plural number in Greek. Both the structure of the dialogue and the pair’s back-and-forth arguments bear a striking resemblance to thinking itself. In its immersive remove from reality, thinking simulates death even as it cannot conceive of its possibility. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus take this to an extreme, and so emerge as the philosophical dream and sophistic nightmare of being disembodied from substance. The Euthydemus is haunted by philosophy’s tenuous relationship to political life. This is played out in the narration through Crito’s implied criticism of Socrates—the phantom image of the Athenian laws—and in the drama itself, which appears to take place in Hades. Thinking of death thus brings with it a lurid parody of the death of thinking: the farce of perfect philosophy that bears the gravity of the city’s sophistry. Thinking of Death also includes a new translation of the Euthydemus that pays careful attention to grammatical ambiguities, nuances, and wit in ways that substantially expand the reader’s access to the dialogue’s mysteries.

From student protests over the teaching of canonical texts such as Plato’s Republic to the use of images of classical Greek statues in white supremacist propaganda, the world of the ancient Greeks is deeply implicated in a heated contemporary debate about identity and diversity. Plato’s Caves defends the bold thesis that Plato was a friend of cultural diversity, contrary to many contemporary perceptions. It shows that, across Plato’s dialogues, foreigners play a role similar to that of Socrates: liberating citizens from intellectual bondage. Through close readings of four Platonic dialogues—Republic, Menexenus, Laws, and Phaedrus—the author recovers Plato’s unique insight into the promise, and risk, of cross-cultural engagement. Like the Socratic “gadfly” who stings the “horse” of Athens into wakefulness, foreigners can provoke citizens to self-reflection by exposing contradictions and confronting them with alternative ways of life. The painfulness of this experience explains why encounters with foreigners often give rise to tension and conflict. Yet it also reveals why cultural diversity is an essential good. Simply put, exposure to cultural diversity helps one develop the intellectual humility one needs to be a good citizen and global neighbor. By illuminating Plato’s epistemological argument for cultural diversity, Plato’s Caves challenges readers to examine themselves and to reinvigorate their love of learning.