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This new edition of Plato's Symposium provides beginning readers and scholars alike with a solid, reliable translation that is both faithful to the original text and accessible to contemporary readers. In addition, the volume offers a number of aids to help the reader make his or her way through this remarkable work: A concise introduction sets the scene, conveys the tenor of the dialogue, and introduces the reader to the main characters with a gloss on their backgrounds and a comment on their roles in the dialogue. It also provides a list of basic points for readers to keep in mind as they read the work. A thought-provoking interpretive essay offers reflections on the themes of the dialogue, focusing especially on the dialogue as drama. A select bibliography points to works, both classic and contemporary, that are especially relevant to readers of the Symposium. Two appendices consist of a line drawing that depicts the spacial layout and positioning of characters in the Symposium, and a chart that shows the relation of the first six speeches to number, age, parentage and the function of Eros.
Plato, Allan Bloom wrote, is "the most erotic of philosophers," and his Symposium is one of the greatest works on the nature of love ever written. This new edition brings together the English translation of the renowned Plato scholar and translator, Seth Benardete, with two illuminating commentaries on it: Benardete's "On Plato's Symposium" and Allan Bloom's provocative essay, "The Ladder of Love." In the Symposium, Plato recounts a drinking party following an evening meal, where the guests include the poet Aristophanes, the drunken Alcibiades, and, of course, the wise Socrates. The revelers give their views on the timeless topics of love and desire, all the while addressing many of the major themes of Platonic philosophy: the relationship of philosophy and poetry, the good, and the beautiful.
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, analysing 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.
Plato's dialogue the Symposium with introduction and commentary.
This collection features Plato's writings on sex and love in the preeminent translations of Stanley Lombardo, Paul Woodruff and Alexander Nehamas, D. S. Hutchinson, and C. D. C. Reeve. Reeve's Introduction provides a wealth of historical information about Plato and Socrates, and the sexual norms of classical Athens. His introductory essay looks closely at the dialogues themselves and includes the following sections: Socrates and the Art of Love; Socrates and Athenian Paiderastia; Loving Socrates; Love and the Ascent to the Beautiful; The Art and Psychology of Love Explained; and Writing about Love.
Plato's Symposium is an exceptionally multi-layered dialogue. At once a historical document, a philosophical drama that enacts abstract ideas in an often light-hearted way, and a literary masterpiece, it has exerted an influence that goes well beyond the confines of philosophy. The essays in this volume, by leading scholars, offer detailed analyses of all parts of the work, focusing on the central and much-debated theme of erōs or 'human desire' - which can refer both to physical desire or desire for happiness. They reveal thematic continuities between the prologue and the various speeches as well as between the speeches themselves, and present a rich collection of contrasting yet complementary readings of Diotima's speech. The volume will be invaluable for classicists and philosophers alike, and for all who are interested in one of Plato's most fascinating and challenging dialogues.
This unique culinary history of America offers a fascinating look at our past and uses long-forgotten recipes to explain how eight flavors changed how we eat. The United States boasts a culturally and ethnically diverse population which makes for a continually changing culinary landscape. But a young historical gastronomist named Sarah Lohman discovered that American food is united by eight flavors: black pepper, vanilla, curry powder, chili powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and Sriracha. In Eight Flavors, Lohman sets out to explore how these influential ingredients made their way to the American table. She begins in the archives, searching through economic, scientific, political, religious, and culinary records. She pores over cookbooks and manuscripts, dating back to the eighteenth century, through modern standards like How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. Lohman discovers when each of these eight flavors first appear in American kitchens—then she asks why. Eight Flavors introduces the explorers, merchants, botanists, farmers, writers, and chefs whose choices came to define the American palate. Lohman takes you on a journey through the past to tell us something about our present, and our future. We meet John Crowninshield a New England merchant who traveled to Sumatra in the 1790s in search of black pepper. And Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old slave who lived on an island off the coast of Madagascar, who discovered the technique still used to pollinate vanilla orchids today. Weaving together original research, historical recipes, gorgeous illustrations and Lohman’s own adventures both in the kitchen and in the field, Eight Flavors is a delicious treat—ready to be devoured.
The Symposium is one of Plato’s most accessible dialogues, an engrossing historical document as well as an entertaining literary masterpiece. By uncovering the structural design of the dialogue, Plato’s Dialectic at Play aims at revealing a Plato for whom the dialogical form was not merely ornamentation or philosophical methodology but the essence of philosophical exploration. His dialectic is not only argument; it is also play. Careful analysis of each layer of the text leads cumulatively to a picture of the dialogue’s underlying structure, related to both argument and myth, and shows that a dynamic link exists between Diotima’s higher mysteries and the organization of the dialogue as a whole. On this basis the authors argue that the Symposium, with its positive theory of art contained in the ascent to the Beautiful, may be viewed as a companion piece to the Republic, with its negative critique of the role of art in the context of the Good. Following Nietzsche’s suggestion and applying criteria developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, they further argue for seeing the Symposium as the first novel. The book concludes with a comprehensive reevaluation of the significance of the Symposium and its place in Plato’s thought generally, touching on major issues in Platonic scholarship: the nature of art, the body-soul connection, the problem of identity, the relationship between mythos and logos, Platonic love, and the question of authorial writing and the vanishing signature of the absent Plato himself.