Volume 26, Number 14 · September 27, 1979
The Virtues of Plato
By M.F. Burnyeat
Plato: The Written and Unwritten Doctrines
by J.N. Findlay
Humanities Press, 484 pp., $26.25
Plato and Platonism: An Introduction
by J.N. Findlay
Times Books, 256 pp., $12.50
Plato's Moral Theory: The Early and Middle Dialogues
by Terence Irwin
Oxford University Press, 392 pp., $11.95 (paper)
The great difficulty in writing about Plato is to combine the depth and strength of the Platonic vision with the Socratic subtlety of the arguments by which it is conveyed. Plato's dialogues are a miraculous blend of philosophical imagination and logic. The interpreter must somehow respond to both, for if the imaginative vision is cut loose from the arguments it becomes grandiloquent posturing, and the arguments on their own are arid, the mere skeleton of a philosophy. So it is already a criticism to say of the books under review that Professor Findlay's work is all vision, without argument, and that Profesor Irwin's is all argument with no vision.
Review, 5413 words
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