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.

Though at first it may seem to deal with rather specific questions concerning rhetoric, Plato’s Gorgias turns out to be about human life, and what is at stake in it. This apparent “change of subject” – or rather this ambiguity in the dialogue’s subjectmatter – has to do with the fact that the Gorgias is very much like a labyrinth: puzzling, intricate, made of multiple meandering paths in which one can easily get lost, and full of deviations which turn this way and that, of entrances that seem to be dead ends, and of dizzying turns that distort all sense of direction.

The Lysis is one of Plato's most engaging but also puzzling dialogues; it has often been regarded, in the modern period, as a philosophical failure. The full philosophical and literary exploration of the dialogue illustrates how it in fact provides a systematic and coherent, if incomplete, account of a special theory about, and special explanation of, human desire and action. Furthermore, it shows how that theory and explanation are fundamental to a whole range of other Platonic dialogues and indeed to the understanding of the corpus as a whole. Part One offers an analysis of, or running commentary on, the dialogue. In Part Two Professors Penner and Rowe examine the philosophical and methodological implications of the argument uncovered by the analysis. The whole is rounded off by an epilogue of the relation between the Lysis and some other Platonic (and Aristotelian) texts.

Participation in religious liturgies and rituals is a pervasive and remarkably complex form of human activity. This book opens with a discussion of the nature of liturgical activity and then explores various dimensions of such activity. Over the past fifty years there has been a remarkable surge of interest, within the analytic tradition of philosophy, in philosophy of religion. Most of what has been written by participants in this movement deals with one or another aspect of religious belief. Yet for most adherents of most religions, participation in the liturgies and rituals of their religion is at least as important as what they believe. One of the aims of this book is to call the attention of philosophers of religion to the importance of religious practice and to demonstrate how rich a topic this is for philosophical reflection. Another aim is to show liturgical scholars who are not philosophers that a philosophical approach to liturgy casts an illuminating light on the topic that supplements their own approach. Insofar as philosophers have written about liturgy, they have focused most of their attention on its formative and expressive functions. This book focuses instead on understanding what liturgical agents actually do. It is what they do that functions formatively or expressively. What they do is basic.

Das Thema des in englischer Sprache verfassten The Myth of the State – dem letzten Werk, das Cassirer vor seinem Tod im Manuskript zum Abschluss bringen konnte – ist die Wiederkehr des politischen Totalitarismus, dem er selbst nur durch Emigration entkam. Der Text belegt, dass die in der Philosophie der symbolischen Formen entwickelte »Kritik der Kultur« auch den Rahmen für eine Theorie des Politischen absteckt und dazu nötigt, auf anthropologischer Ebene die Einheit von »animal symbolicum« und »zoon politikon« zu denken. Cassirer beginnt mit einer Analyse der destruktiven Macht des mythischen Denkens. Er untersucht seine Struktur, seine Beziehung zur Sprache, seinen affektiven Charakter und seine soziale Funktion. Im Anschluss beschreibt Cassirer in einem ideengeschichtlichen Aufriß die Hauptlinien der politischen Theorien von Platon bis zum frühen 19. Jahrhundert, um dann im letzten Teil die Wiedergeburt des Mythos im 20. Jahrhundert zu behandeln. Cassirer schließt, dass der politische Mythos nicht endgültig überwunden, sondern nur »gezähmt« werden kann. Dazu kann die Philosophie beitragen, jedoch nicht, indem sie ihn argumentativ zu widerlegen versucht, sondern indem sie ihn verstehen und so bekämpfen hilft. Eine deutsche Übersetzung – Vom Mythus des Staates – ist in der Philosophischen Bibliothek (Band 541) lieferbar.

An analysis of the hunt, its imagery and allusion, in Middle English literature.