Plato

Resources

Some sources for the core readings

All Plato’s dialogues can be found in electronic form here:

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/aut/plato.html

One real disadvantage with this source is that it does not include line or page numbers (which are important for referencing purposes in your assignment).

And I think there is another: the texts they are based on are old translations (because they are out of copyright) and these to our ears (my ears anyway) are often much less readable and seriously more difficult to fangle out.

Printed versions:

Plato, Five Dialogues, (Hackett, 2002)

Plato, Protagoras and Meno (Penguin, 1956) 

Plato, The Last Days of Socrates (Penguin, 1959)

Introduction to Plato's thought in general

Readable and short and therefore highly valuable is:

David Melling, Understanding Plato, Oxford, 1987, OUP

Scholarly and longer:

J.C.B. Gosling, Plato, London, 1973, Routledge

Background material on ancient philosophy

W.K.C. Guthrie, Socrates, (Cambridge University Press, 1971)

W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers, from Thales to Aristotle (Routledge, 1967)

C.C.W. Taylor, C.C.W., Socrates, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (Penguin, 1987)

Frances Cornford, F.M., Before and After Socrates (Cambridge University Press, 1932)

Christopher Janaway, “Ancient Greek Philosophy I: The Pre-Socratics and Plato” in A.C. Grayling (ed.), Philosophy: A Guide through the Subject (Oxford University Press, 1995)

General philosophy background

John Hospers, An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, 4th edn. (Routledge, 1997)

Richard E. Creel, Thinking Philosophically (Blackwell, 2001)

Mark B. Woodhouse, A Preface to Philosophy 6th edn. (Wadsworth, 2000)

In addition, the library has a number of very useful philosophy encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Don’t hesitate to use these, or to refer to them in your essay (though ideally they should only be used as starting points). Don’t forget, as well, that LLRS provides the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy in CD-ROM form, which you can access using any computer on the University network. 

Pointers to core readings on a week-by-week basis are here. You find time to develop your knowledge and grasp by making use of background reading from the list above. The purpose of this background reading is to shed light on the core reading.

Please note: It is inevitable, given the nature of the module, that some of the core readings will strike you as unfamiliar and challenging (and with this in mind they have deliberately been kept short). You will be expected to study them carefully, noting areas of unclarity/difficulty as you go, and using background readings and seminar discussions as sources of further illumination.  Only a very small cross-section of what is available can be listed here. The course bibliography contains additional suggestions, and you can use references and bibliographies from any of these texts, as well as the library’s search facilities, to track down further relevant material. This is all part of acquiring the study skills that will be needed at level two.

Original text prepared by Peter H-K; revised for 2006-7 by VP