Table of Contents

List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Part I: Plato's Life, Historical, Literary and Philosophic Context
Life of Plato
Aristophanes and intellectuals
Education
Eleatics
Isocrates and Logography
Orality and Literacy
Poetry (epic and lyric)
Presocratics
Pythagoreans
Rhetoric and speech-making
Socrates (historical)
Socratics other than Plato)
Sophists
Part II: The Dialogues
The Platonic Corpus and Manuscript Tradition
Alcibiades
Apology
Charmides
Clitophon
Cratylus
Crito
Dubious and spurious dialogues
(Alcibiades II, Hipparchus, Minos, Rival Lovers, Axiochus, Definitions, On Justice, On Virtue, Demodocus, Eryxias, Sisyphus)
Euthydemus
Euthyphro
Gorgias
Hippias Major
Hippias Minor
Ion
Laches
Laws
Letters
Lysis
Menexenus
Meno
Parmenides
Phaedo Phaedrus
Philebus
Politicus (Statesman)
Protagoras
Republic
Sophist
Symposium
Theaetetus
Theages
Timaeus-Critias
Part III: Special Features of the Dialogues
Anonymity
Characters
Drama
History
Humor Irony
Language
Literary composition
Musical structure
Myths and stories
Pedagogical structure Pedimental structure
Play and seriousness
Proleptic composition
Socrates (the character)
Part IV: Concepts, Themes and Topics treated in the Dialogues
Aesthetics
Akrasia
Antilogy and eristic
Appearance and reality
Art
Beauty
Being and becoming
Causality
Cave
City
Cosmos
Daimon
Death
Desire
Dialectic
Divided Line
Education
Elenchus
Epistemology
Ethics
Excellence
Forms
Friendship
Goodness
Happiness
Image Imitation
Inspiration
Intellectualism
Justice
Language
Law
Logic logos Account
Love
Madness and possession
Mathematics
Medicine
Method
Music
Myth
Nature
Non-propositional knowledge
One, the
Ontology
Paederasteia
Participation
Perception and sensation
Philosophy and the philosopher
Piety
Pleasure
Poetry
Reason
Recollection
Rhetoric
Self-knowledge
Sophists
Soul
Sun simile
Theology
Vision
Women Writing
Part V: Later Reception, Interpretation and Influence
The Ancient World
Ancient Hermeneutics
Aristotle and Plato
Academy of Athens, Ancient History of
Ancient Jewish Platonism
Neoplatonism and its diaspora
The Middle Ages and Renaissance
Medieval Islamic Platonism
Medieval Jewish Platonism
Medieval Christian Platonism
Renaissance Platonism
Cambridge Platonism
Modern and Contemporary Philosophy
Early modern philosophy: from Descartes to Berkeley
Nineteenth-century idealisms
Nineteenth Century Plato scholarship Developmentalism
Compositional chronology
Analytic approaches
Vlastosian approaches
Continental approaches
Straussian approaches
Plato's 'Unwritten doctrines'
Esoterism
The Tübingen Approach
Anti-Platonism, ancient to modern
Bibliography
Index of Names (other than Plato and Socrates)
Index of Topics

Promotional Information

This comprehensive reference guide includes over 140 entries on every aspect of Plato's thought.

About the Author

Gerald A. Press is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, USA, and has published widely on Plato.

Reviews

The editor has assembled a remarkably wide range of contributors, able to cover - as successfully as any team could, within the space of a single volume - the outlines of the complex and fissiparous world of Plato, Platonism, and Platonic interpretation up to the present day. The book represents a unique resource for advanced students and professional scholars alike.
*Christopher Rowe, Emeritus Professor of Greek, Durham University, UK*

Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates through graduate students; general readers.
*CHOICE*

Gerald Press and his associate editors, Harald Tarrant, Deborah Nails and Francesco Gonzalez, have given us a companion to turn (and return) to for succinct guidance about topics in Plato’s philosophy, the intellectual context in which he wrote, and the many different historical and contemporary interpretations of his work . . . Both in overall conception and its individual entries this companion is much to be welcomed . . . The high standard of the contributions and the rich array of entries make this companion an excellent resource for courses on Plato or individual dialogues, while it also has much to offer to anyone who wants a concise and up-to-date introduction to aspects of Plato, his work, or his philosophy.
*Bryn Mawr Classical Review*