Language, Philosophy of, Plato - Ancient Greek Philosophy

Plato's Lysis

Name: Plato's Lysis
Author: Terry Penner
ISBN: 9780521103190

by Terry Penner, Christopher Rowe

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Overview

The Lysis is one of Plato's most engaging but also puzzling dialogues; it has often been regarded, in the modern period, as a philosophical failure. The full philosophical and literary exploration of the dialogue illustrates how it in fact provides a systematic and coherent, if incomplete, account of a special theory about, and special explanation of, human desire and action. Furthermore, it shows how that theory and explanation and fundamental to a whole range of other Platonic dialogues and indeed to the understanding of the corpus as a whole, Part One offers an analysis of, or running commentary on, the dialogue. In Part Two Professors Penner and Rowe examine the philosophical and methodological implications of the argument uncovered by the analysis. The whole is rounded off by an epilogue on the relation between the Lysis and some other Platonic (and Aristotelian) texts.

Synopsis

The Lysis is one of Plato's most engaging but also puzzling dialogues, often regarded as a philosophical failure.

About the Author, Terry Penner

Terry Penner is Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, and was, for a time, Affiliate Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In Spring 2005 he was A. G. Leventis Visiting Research Professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh. His previous publications include The Ascent from Nominalism: Some Existence Arguments in Plato's Middle Dialogues(1986) and numerous articles on Socrates.

Christopher Rowe is Professor of Greek at the University of Durham; he was Leverhulme Personal Research Professor from 1999 until 2004. His previous publications include commentaries on four Platonic dialogues; he has edited The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (with Malcolm Schofield, 2000) and New Perspectives on Plato, Modern and Ancient(with Julia Annas, 2002), as well as providing a new translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics to accompany a philosophical commentary by Sarah Broadie (2002).