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Plato: Republic |
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Plato's Republic 2007 • 978-1-58510-261-7 • paper • 358 pages • 6 x 9 • $18.95 About the Authors | Table of Contents | Preface | Review |
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Description In the Republic Plato uses numerous dialogues between Socrates and various characters in Athens to discuss the nature of government, including the nature of justice, the happiness of the just and the unjust man, the nature of rule in the ideal city-state, and other matters essential to understanding classical philosophy such as the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, poetry and the role of the philosopher in society. As with most other texts in the Focus Philosophical Library, this translation is close to the original, non-interpretative, with the notes and glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato’s immediate audience. The extensive introduction is by Joe Sachs, who has taught for over three decades in the Great Books program at St Johns College in Annapolis. It also contains an extensive afterword, Imitation, by John White. Other useful features include a chapter-by-chapter outline of principal speakers and summary of the content, Stephanus numbers, boldface type to indicate the entrance of a new speaker into the discussion, footnotes, and glossary of key terms with cross-references for the text.
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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.
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Table
of Contents
Introduction
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But why should the English-speaking world be subjected to yet another version of the Republic? Over the past forty years or so, I have read the dialogue all the way through in translation at least a dozen times. Whatever new translation I have read from time to time, I have always returned to that of Allan Bloom as by far the most accurate available. I have no serious complaints about Bloom’s translation, but the mere fact that it has held the field since 1968 is reason enough to try to discover whether a worthy alternative to it can be provided. I don’t seek to emulate Thrasymachus, who thinks an intelligent person would want to outdo any artful piece of work by someone else, but it is at least true that I don’t share Bloom’s preoccupations, and the different choices I have made may foster some new thought and discussion about an inexhaustible book. I depart a bit farther than Bloom does from the 19th century diction enshrined forever in such reference works as the lexicons of Liddell and Scott and the commentary of James Adam, without moving all the way into current colloquial speech. That sort of attempt to hit a moving target can never simply be a success. "You’re a damned shyster," Raymond Larson’s version of a remark at 340D, no more captures the exact tone and content of the original than "Do you play the sycophant with me, my good sir?" would; it merely changes the manner of its obsolescence. Plato’s characters can be kept recognizably human and natural, speaking neither the English one might have heard in the rooms of an Oxbridge don in 1905, nor the sort one would find in barrooms, or chat rooms, in 2005. . . .This volume contains a number of features designed to help the reader contend with the length and complexity of the dialogue. At the beginning of each of its ten books there is a listing of the main shifts among the principal speakers, identified by ranges of Stephanus numbers; these run from 327A to 621D, page numbers and page divisions from a 16th-century Greek edition of Plato’s works, now used universally as a standard pagination, and included here in the margins. Boldface type is used to mark the entrance into the discussion of a new speaker who will be talking with Socrates for an extended time, so you can always look back to the last boldface name, or to the list at the beginning of that book, to remind you who "he" is. There is also a brief prefatory note at the beginning of each book to summarize the content and flow of the discussion, and there are footnotes throughout. The latter serve various purposes, primarily to identify references and to mention anything I’ve learned over the years that has been particularly helpful to my reading of the dialogue. You shouldn’t take my word for any interpretation contained in these comments; I encourage you to use such notes for what they’re worth and dismiss them whenever your own thinking supersedes them. The glossary provides comments on some of the most important words used in the dialogue, when their exact meanings cannot easily be gathered from their uses in context; it may be worthwhile to read through the glossary before reading the dialogue. The index does not aspire to comprehensiveness in any respect; it has the more modest purpose of providing a sufficient array of signposts to help you find your way around among the various regions of the dialogue. Entries in the index are to the Stephanus pages within the text, or, when followed by the letter n, to the footnotes to them. The afterword is intended to balance the general discussion of the dialogue in this introduction with an example of a sustained exploration of a single major theme. An effort has been made throughout to choose all this supplementary material with a light touch, aimed at that happy medium which may assist an intelligent reading without overwhelming it.
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Joe Sachs, known and respected for his excellent translations of Aristotle, deserves great praise for this new translation of Plato's Republic. Based on the latest definitive edition of the Greek text and guided by a sense that Greek in English need not read like an old, foreign tongue, Sachs' translation captures the flow of the conversation in an English that reads smoothly, even when the ideas expressed force one to pause and look again. Fluid, yet accurate, Sachs' translation allows the thoughtful reader deeper entry into this all-important book. The editorial guides and typographical signs to remind the reader of who has joined the argument most recently are all highly helpful and most welcome. I look forward to reading this with students.~ Charles E. Butterworth, University of Maryland
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