Faced with the difficult task of discerning Plato's true ideas from the contradictory voices he used to express them, scholars have never fully made sense of the many incompatibilities within and between the dialogues. In "The Magisterial Plato's Philosophers", Catherine H. Zuckert explains for the first time how these prose dramas cohere to reveal a comprehensive Platonic understanding of philosophy. To expose this coherence, Zuckert examines the dialogues not in their supposed order of composition but according to the dramatic order in which Plato indicates they took place. This unconventional arrangement lays bare a narrative of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. In the drama's earliest dialogues, for example, non-Socratic philosophers introduce the political and philosophical problems to which Socrates tries to respond. A second dramatic group shows how Socrates develops his distinctive philosophical style. And the later dialogues feature interlocutors who reveal his philosophy's limitations. Despite these limitations, Zuckert concludes, Plato made Socrates the dialogues' central figure because Socrates raises the fundamental human question: what is the best way to live? Plato's dramatization of Socratic imperfections suggests, moreover, that he recognized the apparently unbridgeable gap between our understandings of human life and the nonhuman world. At a time when this gap continues to raise questions - about the division between sciences and the humanities and the potentially dehumanizing effects of scientific progress - Zuckert's brilliant interpretation of the entire Platonic corpus offers genuinely new insights into worlds past and present.

About the Author
Catherine H. Zuckert is the Nancy R. Dreux Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Postmodern Platos and coauthor of The Truth about Leo Strauss, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews
"Plato's Philosophers is brilliantly conceived, remarkably well executed, decidedly innovative, and enormously important. Illuminating a pattern of dramatic cohesiveness within Plato's body of work, Catherine Zuckert offers a compelling alternative to interpretations that trace a developmental logic across the dialogues. This book will spur us to rethink concepts and perspectives that have been taken for granted for too long. It is magisterial in the finest sense." - Gerald Mara, Georgetown University"



Book Information
ISBN 9780226993355
Author Catherine H. Zuckert
Format Hardback
Page Count 896
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 1446g
Dimensions(mm) 24mm * 15mm * 6mm