Frisbee Sheffield argues that the Symposium has been unduly marginalized by philosophers. Although the topic, eros, and the setting at a symposium have seemed anomalous, she demonstrates that both are intimately related to Plato's preoccupation with the nature of the good life, with virtue, and how it is acquired and transmitted. For Plato, analyzing our desires is a way of reflecting on the kind of people we will turn out to be and on our chances of leading a worthwhile and (...) happy life. In its focus on the question why he considered desires to be amenable to this type of reflection, this book explores Plato's ethics of desire. (shrink)

This book explores for the first time an idea common to both Plato and Aristotle: although people are separate, their lives need not be; one person's life may overflow into another's, so that helping someone else is a way of serving oneself. Price considers how this idea unites the philosophers' treatments of love and friendship (which are otherwise very different), and demonstrates that this view of love and friendship, applied not only to personal relationships, but also to the household and (...) even the city-state, promises to resolve the old dichotomy between egoism and altruism. (shrink)

Book synopsis: Reissued in 1997 with corrections and a new Afterword, this book fully explores for the first time an idea common to Plato and Aristotle, which unites their treatments - otherwise very different - of love and friendship. The idea is that although persons are separate, their lives need not be. One person's life may overflow into another's, and as such, helping another person is a way of serving oneself. The author shows how their view of love and friendship, (...) within not only personal relationships, but also the household and even the city-state, promises to resolve the old dichotomy between egoism and altruism. (shrink)

In the Sophist Plato introduces a very peculiar character, the eleatic stranger who plays both for Theaetetus and for us the role of a perfect sophist. His terrific power simply comes of his refusal to understand the examples. He just requires his interlocutors that absolutely all what is to be understood by them must be explicitly said. And “all” means really all: even the most evident for everybody, all what is not necessary to say and perhaps is not possible either. (...) The eleatic visitor, in order to hunt the sophist whose role himself is playing, trays to say all indeed, even the most difficult: the meaning of words as being, not-being, same, other or similarity. In this way, the language shows oneself as a play of likeness and unlikeness. (shrink)