Plato Dialogues Pdf

[Jennifer Leos]

Volume1 (with 9 dialogues) of a 5 volume edition of Plato by the great English Victorian Greek scholar, Benjamin Jowett. The scholarly apparatus is immense and detailed. The online version preserves the marginal comments of the printed edition and has links to all the notes and comments provided by Jowett.

Plato wrote extensively and most of his writings survived. His works are in the form of dialogues, where several characters argue a topic by asking questions of each other. This form allows Plato to raise various points of view and let the reader decide which is valid. Plato expounded a form of dualism, where there is a world of ideal forms separate from the world of perception. The most famous exposition of this is his metaphor of the Cave, where people living in a cave are only able to see flickering shadows projected on the wall of the external reality. This influenced many later thinkers, particularly the Neoplatonists and the Gnostics, and is similar to views held by some schools of Hindu dualistic metaphysics.

Plato died in 347 B.C.E. In the middle ages he was eclipsed by Aristotle. His works were saved for posterity by Islamic scholars and reintroduced into the west in the Renaissance. Since then he has been a strong influence on philosophy, as well as natural and social science.

Apology (the Death of Socrates)

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Crito

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Charmides, or Temperance

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Laches or Courage

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Lysis, or Friendship

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Euthyphro

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Ion

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Gorgias

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Protagoras

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Meno

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Euthydemus

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Cratylus

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Phaedo

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Phaedrus

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Symposium

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

The Republic

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Theaetetus

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Parmenides

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Sophist

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Statesman

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Philebus

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Timaeus

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Critias

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

Laws

translated by Benjamin Jowett [1871]

The Seventh Letter

translated by J. Harward [1928]

In Plato's Dialogues, he often would put words into the mouths of two opposing points-of-view, while inserting a third voice, often initially presented as taking a position between the two viewpoints, to act as an arbiter to decide the merits of the two views. (I'm not a philosopher, so feel free to correct me on that, but I think I have the broad strokes correct at least.)

Since he clearly favored one of those points of view (the one which the arbiter ends up siding with, of course), and since at least some of the time it felt to me that he was exaggerating the opposing point of view, can it be said that he was resorting to using strawmen to make his point? Have other philosophers previously made this point?

Plato's use of two persons with opposite opinions, Heraclitus and Parmenides or say the sophists and friends of his time, were for centuries taken too literately. Today we shouldn't fall in the same trap.

If we take the dialogues too literately, calling it usage of strawmen is fair. There are a few objections that are important. Interpretations by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) gave a deep insight on how Plato actually was being both ironic and serious at the same time.

Ironic in the joyful sense. Imagine that scholars for hundreds of years had poured over the dialogues, taken them literate and not understood the playful irony, even though Heraclitus was referred to with quotations like "everything flows" and Parmenides with "change is impossible", the act of figuring out why they said what they did and how the discussions the partners in the dialogue ended up with nonsense arguments themselves. We see this happening over and over: in politics with democrats and republicans, for and against climate change. How do we go about dealing with opposite opinons?

The point of having to opposed opinions and "rubbing them together" until a spark of fire emerges is part of Plato's dialectical method. This is serious stuff. His method is not ridiculing both of the claims in order to reach a higher insight, but just as much an exercise in thinking, the connection between things being said and physical circumstances that could prove them right or wrong - a method of logical reasoning to discern between truth and falsehood.

While I agree that some of Plato's Socratic interlocutors are straw men, whether they are straw men or not does not hinge on whether he includes voices that disagree nor even on whether their views are absurd. I think among the interlocutors we can distinguish roughly three categories:

"Useful idiots" are those views that exist to help us see an obvious reply to an obvious objection. Thus, they say something we might first think when we hear an idea. And this gives Socrates the chance to explain how that does not apply to the view he is trying to articulate. This sort of dialectical method is also central to Hegel where the negative is necessary to move forward because it highlights what is wrong with the currently held view.

I do think there are some genuinely different views voiced at points during the Republic, Parmenides, and also the Laws and several of the later dialogues. There are questions raised where Socrates does not win or at least where as a reader we are not compelled to agree.

There are still some straw men of course. But I don't think Plato is our worst offender on that point. And what makes them strawmen is if they articulate views that someone genuinely holds in a way that does not do justice to that view.

So for instance in contemporary philosophy, not every objection I include in a paper is one that I really expect someone to raise. Instead, some are to dispel misunderstandings before they happen. Often the best way to avoid this is to quote, but there's really not much lying around for Plato to quote. It's not clear how much access he would have had to texts or how much beyond a cursory familiarity his school would have had with some of the sophists.

The works that have been transmitted to us through the middle ages under the name of Plato consist in a set of 41 so-called "dialogues" plus a collection of 13 letters and a book of Definitions (1). But it was already obvious in antiquity that not all of these were from Plato's own hand.

At some point in antiquity, it became traditional to arrange Plato'sdialogues in groups of four called "tetralogies" after the groupingof Athenian theater : Diogenes Lrtius explicitly relates this groupingto that of Greek tragedies and quotes his source for such grouping as attributingit to Plato himself, if not for the reported grouping, at least for thefact of writing them in tetralogies (DL III, 56). Our known sourcefor such grouping, and the one cited by Diogenes, is a certain Thrasyllus,of which we know very little, and who might have lived during the 1st centuryAD. Unfortunately, his grouping in 9 tetralogies, which survived in medievalmanuscripts, mixes wheat and weed, and thus does not do much to help usbelieve it dates back to Plato himself. It goes as follows :

But the same Diogenes mentions also a grouping in trilogies (groupsof three), which he attributes to Aristophanes of Byzantium (IIIrd centuryBC) and which covers only a subset of the dialogues. This one goes as follows :

One point we may mention is that the tetralogies of Greek theater weremade up of one comedy and a trilogy of tragedies. If there is anythingin the idea that Plato grouped his dialogues according to such an arrangement,it might explain why we sometimes hear of tetralogies, sometimes of trilogies...But more about that later.

A complete alphabetical list of all works by or attributed to Plato may be found at the end of note 3 in the contents description of the latest complete edition of their English translation (Hackett, 1997), or on the page of this site that provides links to Plato's works on the Web. Note 3 also provides a selection of various editions of the dialogues in English.

Lastly, readers wishing to put Plato's dialogues in context with regard to the litterary and historical activity of his time will find in the bibliography on and around Plato available elsewhere on this site bibliographical indications on works whose reading may shed light on the dialogues.

Many English translations of various dialogues are available from different publishers, including, for most of them, paperback editions in economy collections. Here are the translations available in the Penguin Classics edition:

Readers who don't have knowledge of Greek are strongly advised to make use of several translation of the same dialogue as soon as they want to do serious work on them, if only to avoid building "wild" theories on what may in the end only be a feature of a single translation, not of Plato's text, and to get a feel for where there might be translation problems, when they see varying translations for the same section. (back)

This website exhibits the fruits of a project, commenced in 2008, to translate the complete works of Plato from the original Greek into English. This project is supported by the Foundation for Platonic Studies.

We welcome your feedback on this new translation, which is still being finalised. You can highlight text on any page to quickly send feedback about the work (may not work on all devices). You can also send feedback to comm...@platonicfoundation.org.

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