In Symposium, a group of Athenian aristocrats attend a party and talk about love, until the drunken Alcibiades bursts in and decides to discuss Socrates instead. Symposium gives an unsurpassed picture of the sparkling society that was Athens at the height of her empire.
The setting of the other dialogues is more sombre. Socrates is put on trial for impiety, and sentenced to death. Euthyphro discusses the nature of piety, Apology is Socrates' speech in his own defence, Crito explains his refusal to escape punishment, and Phaedo gives an account of Socrates' last day.
These dialogues have never been offered in one volume before. Tom Griffith's Symposium has been described as 'possibly the finest translation of any Platonic dialogue'. All the other translations are new.
'Philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato', said the twentieth-century philosopher Whitehead, and in the nineteenth century Ferrier wrote: 'All philosophic truth is Plato rightly divined; all philosophic error is Plato misunderstood'. Though Plato was born almost 2,500 years ago, many would agree. Similar tribute could hardly be paid to other great forerunners in learning. It would be absurd to say that astronomy is a series of footnotes to Copernicus, or that medical errors are Galen misunderstood. That this is so is partly due to the nature of philosophy, which is less amenable to proof and progress than are other areas of knowledge, and which need not therefore be superseded. Yet philosophy, like science, relies on cumulative building, for it consists of argument and counterargument. Plato set the agenda for all subsequent philosophy, asking questions that are still unsolved, and creating the framework in which they would be tackled. His thought contains in embryo the whole of Western philosophy. His own answers may ultimately be wrong, as are most philosophical answers, but they are compelling, tantalising, and seminal in their wrongness. Most great philosophers have engaged with him, whether as ally or antagonist.
