A Plato Reader: Eight Essential Dialogues (Hackett Classics)

Great paperback edition. Good paper and typeface.

8 dialogues in textbook font size and textbook paper weighing more than the 1.5 page aristotle anthology from modern library - you are indeed getting the premium translation but maybe the modern library or the signet plato anthology should have sufficed

Purchased it for school again used and it was just as they said slightly used but very well taken care of it’s great

I bought this book for a class in college, it was in great condition there were no bends in any pages or anything like that. Very good book.

Perfect starting point for Philosophy in general. Very readable dialogues

Exactly what I wanted but the book has a weird smell

...these ones are accurate. Stonemason or not, Socrates by no means speak like an educated Victorian. And if you must read only 8 of his many classic works, this is good enough a selection.

Book arrived just as described and they included a couple extra study items due to an unforeseen shipping issue. #happy

This collection of eight dialogues contains nothing new in translation, as all the translations, have been previously published by Hackett, but it does present an excellent sample, aimed perhaps at a reader unfamiliar with Plato. The model is perhaps, the excellent, though much slimmer, ‘Five dialogues’ containing the Apology and the Phaedo, etc., in Grube’s transla If one was only going to have, as it were, one book by Plato, this would be a very good choice as it represents excellent value. tions, which Hackett have recently reissued as a second edition.As implied, this is not slim, measuring some 23cm by 15cm by 3 cm with some 575 odd pages of which about half are devoted to the Republic (Reeve’s translation into direct speech which is very accessible). Any more pages, and Hackett would have had to produce a hardback edition, which obviously would have increased the price, and reduced their market. What other dialogues might be called essential: The Symposium and The Phaedrus – in the Nehamas/Woodruff translation; the Phaedo in the Grube translation; and the others – Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Meno translated by Reeve. The collection is a good interpretation of ‘essential’; to have included, for example, the Theaetetus would have made the edition too bulky, while Parmenides would have to be excluded due to its complexity compared to the others included here. To get the Grube ‘Five Dialogues’, and then the Republic, the Symposium, and the Phaedrus, in separate editions, that would cost more than this edition, and there are very good translations of those dialogues on the Market, but if one was only going to have, as it were, one book by Plato, this would be a very good choice as it represents excellent value.

I would strongly recommend these dialogues to anyone in a sincere pursuit for truth, justice, purity, beauty, etc.. Socrates is the embodiment of the examined life.