|  home  |  contact info  |  policies  |  search  |  authors  |

|  copyright  |  email us  |  college stores  |

|  school stores  |  online store  |  International Orders  |

| Student online Resources |  desk/exam copies  |  Feedback Form  |

Plato's Theaetetus

Plato: Theaetetus

Joe Sachs

 St. John's College, Annapolis

 2004 • 1-58510-101-X • paper • 136 pages • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • $9.95

As with all volumes in the Focus Classical Library, this new translation by Joe Sachs adheres close to the original text, providing notes and an introduction to the work designed to give the intelligent reader access to thought and thought processes of one of the seminal works in the Socratic tradition.

|  About the Author  |  Contents  |  Preface  |  Review  |

 Author                                                   

Joe Sachs taught for thirty years at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland.  He has translated Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics and On the Soul and, for the Focus Philosophical Library, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Poetics as well as Plato's Theaetetus and Republic.

 Table of Contents                                     

Introduction
Acknowledgments
The Theaetetus

Plato’s Theaetetus is the first in a series of three dialogues depicting one long interrupted conversation spread out over two days. The dialogues from the second day are the Sophist and the Statesman, in which the discussion is launched by a question posed by Socrates, asking whether there are one, two, or three kinds of people corresponding to the names sophist, statesman, and philosopher. There is no dialogue called the Philosopher, nor any that formally asks what a philosopher is. This trilogy, therefore, seems to have one member too few and one too many. Some scholars have conjectured that a symmetrical pattern may have been intended to culminate in a fourth dialogue, producing a tetralogy along the lines of a Virginia Reel, changing conversational partners from Socrates and Theaetetus, to Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger, to the Eleatic Stranger and Young Socrates, to the notional pairing of Young Socrates and Socrates.1 Other and more astute readers have noticed that a dialogue between partners with the same name might be no dialogue at all, but the silent thinking within one soul, especially since thinking and dialogue are contrasted in just that way by both Socrates (Theaetetus, 189E) and the Eleatic Stranger (Sophist, 263E). Hence, the Philosopher would not be an absent dialogue but the image of the silent presence of Socrates himself, thinking his own thoughts.

Sachs’s outstanding new translation of Plato’s Theaetetus is lucid, readable, and faithful to the original. More than that, it is a translation for the thoughtful reader. Through his striking translations of key terms, Sachs compels the reader to think more deeply about Plato’s intent. He shows that Plato’s return within the dialogue to the same word or to its cognates is no accident but signals a philosophical trope in Plato’s thought. The work’s introduction avoids presenting a stock summary of the topics covered or a rehearsal of the failed arguments. Instead, it makes the case for regarding the Theaetetus as Plato’s ‘missing’ work on The Philosopher. Through the ‘variety of attempts, errors, new beginnings, and false turns that the dialogue presents,’ Sachs argues, Socrates provokes his interlocutors and Plato’s readers to strive to cross the boundary between mere opinion and the kind of thinking that is philosophy.

-- Roslyn Weiss, Lehigh University