To be honest, I can't really tell who the intended audience is here. Cambridge commissioned a bunch of academics to write essays, and often times, you can tell they're putting as little work in as possible to get the money. The essays are basically divided into wildly obscure pieces and "No, duh" essays.
Three essays in, you get a piece on the chronology of Plato's work. Great topic. But the author really means it. It examines things like the number of instances Plato wrote "indeed," and uses that as a basis to put together a timeframe. If you're interested in the chronology of the dialogues, nearly every introduction of translations of Plato's works will give you a less complicated thesis. I'm sure a lot of work went into this piece, but, again, I have no idea who the audience for this is. I'm not even sure academics would be interested, unless they're devoting their life's work into the historicity of Plato.
Other essays take otherwise clear dialogues and obfuscate them so much that you have no idea what you're reading. Almost all essays require that you're familiar with everything Plato has ever written, including the dialogues we aren't even sure he wrote. In addition, I hope you're also up to date on your Aristotle, because his works are cited in nearly every essay. So keep that in mind. To take in any of this information, you'll need to have read and studied almost every work of ancient Greek philosophy (and if you have, by the way, why would you need this book?).
The essays that aren't impossible to read serve little purpose. An essay on Platonic Love just reiterates The Symposium and Phadreus (with a hint of contempt, by the way), without adding anything new. Neither of those dialogues are particularly difficult to read, so I'm not sure why you'd need a summary. In fact, there is quite a lot of contempt in this volume.
I don't know. I can appreciate the work some of these writers put in, and something tells me there is a group of people out there for whom it will be of massive interest. I just don't know who it is. Not students, not casual readers, not teachers, and probably not even a large swath of academics. Definitely not anyone who isn't 100% well-versed in every single work of Plato and most of Aristotle. There are a few I haven't read that could very well be decent. So I don't want to dismiss it outright. You're basically just getting short thesis papers from fifteen authors who got paid to write whatever they wanted. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this will be of great interest to you, and I'm reading it the wrong way. But maybe "look inside" on Amazon first and ask yourself if you'll really be better off having spent fifty dollars on this. I haven't read any of the other Cambridge Companions, but I am open to ordering another one on a different subject. I doubt they have dubious intentions. Supplemental material is always great, and I'm glad volumes like this are being published. But, for most people here on Amazon, I can guarantee that at least half of these essays won't be of any interest or use to you.
ISBN-13:
978-0521436106
ISBN-10:
9780521436106
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Customer reviews
Top reviews from other countries
Michael
Not an Introduction
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 5, 2021Verified Purchase
Geoffrey Johnson
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 13, 2016Verified Purchase
Dominic Perugino
More respect for the book please.
Reviewed in Canada on January 13, 2016Verified Purchase
Robert Carey
Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 4, 2014Verified Purchase
Richard J. Newton
Good and helpful, but too few chapters are directly useful for me
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 14, 2010Verified Purchase
