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The Portable Plato
Writing in the fourth century B.C., in an Athens that had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Plato formulated questions that have haunted the moral, religious, and political imagination of the West for more than 2,000 years: what is virtue? How should we love? What constitutes a good society? Is there a soul that outlasts the body and a truth that transcends appearance? What do we know and how do we know it? Plato's inquiries were all the more resonant because he couched them in the form of dramatic and often highly comic dialogues, whose principal personage was the ironic, teasing, and relentlessly searching philosopher Socrates. In this splendid collection, Scott Buchanan brings together the most important of Plato's dialogues, including Protagoras, The Symposium, with its barbed conjectures about the relation between love and madness, Phaedo and The Republic, his monumental work of political philosophy. Buchanan's learned and engaging introduction allows us to see Plato both as a commentator on his society and as a shaper of the societies that followed, who bequeathed to us a hunger for the ideal as well as a redeeming habit of humane skepticism.
696 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1948
48 people are currently reading
378 people want to read
About the author
Plato
5,218 books8,619 followersPlato (Greek: Πλάτων), born Aristocles (c. 427 – 348 BC), was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms. He raised problems for what became all the major areas of both theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy, and was the founder of the Platonic Academy, a philosophical school in Athens where Plato taught the doctrines that would later become known as Platonism.
Plato's most famous contribution is the theory of forms (or ideas), which has been interpreted as advancing a solution to what is now known as the problem of universals. He was decisively influenced by the pre-Socratic thinkers Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, although much of what is known about them is derived from Plato himself.
Along with his teacher Socrates, and Aristotle, his student, Plato is a central figure in the history of philosophy. Plato's entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years—unlike that of nearly all of his contemporaries. Although their popularity has fluctuated, they have consistently been read and studied through the ages. Through Neoplatonism, he also greatly influenced both Christian and Islamic philosophy. In modern times, Alfred North Whitehead famously said: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
Plato's most famous contribution is the theory of forms (or ideas), which has been interpreted as advancing a solution to what is now known as the problem of universals. He was decisively influenced by the pre-Socratic thinkers Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, although much of what is known about them is derived from Plato himself.
Along with his teacher Socrates, and Aristotle, his student, Plato is a central figure in the history of philosophy. Plato's entire body of work is believed to have survived intact for over 2,400 years—unlike that of nearly all of his contemporaries. Although their popularity has fluctuated, they have consistently been read and studied through the ages. Through Neoplatonism, he also greatly influenced both Christian and Islamic philosophy. In modern times, Alfred North Whitehead famously said: "the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 21, 2014
Scott Buchanan's introduction to The Portable Plato is beautiful and wise and alone is worth the price of admission. Then we are confronted by the challenging words of Plato and Socrates...
“The reader of Plato joins Socrates in inquiry, as Sancho Panza joined Don Quixote, for adventures of the mind. And although there is a deep consent, like a fire kindled deep in the mind, there is always a tension between the squire and the knight-errant, the little man with proverbs for wisdom riding on a donkey and the knight with the piercing eye riding on a horse, those two parts of each human soul. The intellectual destiny that each of us has depends upon who gets the upper hand, knight or squire.”--from Scott Buchanan's introduction to “The Portable Plato.”
“The reader of Plato joins Socrates in inquiry, as Sancho Panza joined Don Quixote, for adventures of the mind. And although there is a deep consent, like a fire kindled deep in the mind, there is always a tension between the squire and the knight-errant, the little man with proverbs for wisdom riding on a donkey and the knight with the piercing eye riding on a horse, those two parts of each human soul. The intellectual destiny that each of us has depends upon who gets the upper hand, knight or squire.”--from Scott Buchanan's introduction to “The Portable Plato.”
July 4, 2013
A great translation and a wonderful introduction
May 9, 2016
In the beginning was the Word. And this Word was with God.
Or perhaps God was mute. And the noises man makes, from his opening mewls to his deathbed's testament, are pleasant for the fact of being spoken. But any deeper meaning in them is an illusion--just another created pleasure, akin to a child pretending his babbling will open the doors to Ali Baba's treasure.
In all the world, there are only Plato and Nietzsche. Plato, before the Evangelist, told us there was the Word. Nietzsche tells us there is, at the most, a kind of scatting or idle humming, without a greater melody or rhyme, and we must base our lives upon this fact.
All philosophical questions, in one way or the other, can be boiled down to Word and anti-Word. Behind the Apostle John, Plato is the greatest advocate of the Word. The Word is true essence, the godhead towards which our mortal perceptions are shadows on the wall of a cave. The Word preexists us. It is Being, unadulterated by matter. It is Idea unsullied by mortal thought. The visible world is seen through a glass darkly. The highest pursuit of man is to unshackle himself from the bounds of sight, sound, and touch, and to transcend himself, approaching the world of pure reason, spirit, and soul. The senses must be tamed, cherished, but never wholly trusted. This world is but a waking shadow of True Reality, of Pure Being, mere echoes of the highest Song in the cosmos.
Plato's best explication of this philosophy of the Word is in The Republic, with the famous man in the cave scenario. In , Plato argues that courage is a virtue which can be taught. The coward is not beholden to weak instinct--the instinct to flee, after all, is beneficial and possibly brave in the right context. Rather, the coward is the product of his own ignorance of what the ultimate good. It is this ignorance--not instinct, per se--which causes him to put his immediate safety ahead of right action in battle. The ideal good for a courageous man is to pinpoint the right balance between fight and flight, and to spend his life aiming to achieve this. Instinct itself is subsumed in the larger question of what is good, for if the instinct is currently deficient, it merely needs more practice, more work, more education.That ideal courage exists for him to achieve, regardless of how weak the nerves he was given at birth. Because the ideal courage predates us, it shines like a star for us to aspire to, and not as a ball of gas made up of our own egotistical excrescences.
Nietzsche is the anti-Plato, and is the greatest of all ant-Platonists. Like the Word, Nietzsche has always existed. He appears as Callicles in Gorgias, claiming that the life of the invidious tyrant is better than the man of virtue's. He exists in Edward Gibbon, who cynically derides the Platonists for suggesting the immortality of the soul. He exists in William Blake, who spurns the higher obligations of man for the merely spiritual—that is to say, the ego, since spiritualism without the Spirit is nothing but solipsism. Nietzsche is merely the most brilliant of the Nietzscheans.
Is courage a virtue that can be taught? I would be vulgar and wrong to say that Nietzsche thought the senses could not be tamed into a kind of courage; accurate to say that Nietzsche disbelieved in any kind of Platonic virtue. The idea that a right mixture of fight and flight, of knowing and impulse, exists for the weak-willed man to aspire is anathema, the height of foolishness. Courageous is as courageous does. By raising this "virtue" up beyond the physical requirements of it--by making it a star to which even the untermenschen can aspire--we deceive the weak into thinking that courage or anything which Plato calls a virtue is something that can be taught. Plato fetishizes the mind, ignoring that fact that courage is more about brute force and--of course--will than any kind of learning. The Platonic idea of courage, which sees it as a good to be aspired to, is replaced by courage as an attribute of the strong-willed. And hence, we remove beyond good and evil...
The dramatic difference here. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche trusts the empirical, the physical, the demonstrable. The idea of deducing a higher Virtue from the material world is ludicrous. The material world is not an echo of a greater symphony, nor a shadow of a true object. The world is what it appears to be, without the idle philosophizing of Socrates or Plato. Man is an observing machine, but an inadequate one at that. His end is the will itself; no higher Good exists.
There's something, shall we say, sub-philosophical in jumping to the ad hominem at this point. But as the two competing assertions, Nietzsche's that no Good exists, and Plato's that one does, are what Kuhn would term a non-falsifiable paradigm, we have to take arguments where we can get them. The Platonist can retort to the empiricist that the empiricist is merely using a refined form of deduction. The Newtonian can battle the Einsteinian, draping his theory in more and more ornate bells and whistles until he can convince himself that relativity theory is false. In science, these paradigms are only good for the purpose we derive from them as predictive engines; in philosophy, we might try the same thing. And what is to be said of a philosophy that drove its greatest proponent to incestuous insanity?
The Platonic philosophy gives man his due. Much is made of "faith" in both religious and non-religious contexts, but the first and most important kind of faith extant is that which says to a man that what he perceives in his senses actually exists. A man who didn't believe this has no reason not to put his hand on a burning stove, or step in front of a moving car. This is essentially as far as Nietzsche goes, where Plato takes the next step. Man's thoughts mean something. Ideas, patterns, relationships, form something higher than the mere matter which forms these relations. Existing at a higher level than matter, these relations lead man to contemplate higher relations, relations which govern the whole of the makeup the universe. And the highest organizer, the grandest conceiver of ideas, is God Himself.
One of the greatest faults of modern Christianity is its ability to ignore the fact that belief in Man must predate a belief in God. To believe we can perceive God, to believe that we are in any way able to partake of His gifts, presumes a belief in man's ration. If man is but a feeling, craving, desiring being, none of his senses can cohere into anything which suggests a higher power. If man's reason did not exist, God could not be perceived, of course. But if man's reason did not exist we would have no morality, no perceptible order, no way to abide by the Will of God.
How much of faith is really a faith in reason? A faith in man’s ability to discern the world, to let his logic take him to the heights of all being and knowledge. Faith in God is a faith in man. Plato makes the assertion that man matters. From the power of reason alone, man can brave the heights of heaven, so long as he follows his reason.
This Big Idea has shaped Western Civilization in ways we don't now appreciate. The chaos and misanthropy which characterizes the modern age is largely the result of unmooring ourselves from Plato's teachings. If only we could go back!
Or perhaps God was mute. And the noises man makes, from his opening mewls to his deathbed's testament, are pleasant for the fact of being spoken. But any deeper meaning in them is an illusion--just another created pleasure, akin to a child pretending his babbling will open the doors to Ali Baba's treasure.
In all the world, there are only Plato and Nietzsche. Plato, before the Evangelist, told us there was the Word. Nietzsche tells us there is, at the most, a kind of scatting or idle humming, without a greater melody or rhyme, and we must base our lives upon this fact.
All philosophical questions, in one way or the other, can be boiled down to Word and anti-Word. Behind the Apostle John, Plato is the greatest advocate of the Word. The Word is true essence, the godhead towards which our mortal perceptions are shadows on the wall of a cave. The Word preexists us. It is Being, unadulterated by matter. It is Idea unsullied by mortal thought. The visible world is seen through a glass darkly. The highest pursuit of man is to unshackle himself from the bounds of sight, sound, and touch, and to transcend himself, approaching the world of pure reason, spirit, and soul. The senses must be tamed, cherished, but never wholly trusted. This world is but a waking shadow of True Reality, of Pure Being, mere echoes of the highest Song in the cosmos.
Plato's best explication of this philosophy of the Word is in The Republic, with the famous man in the cave scenario. In , Plato argues that courage is a virtue which can be taught. The coward is not beholden to weak instinct--the instinct to flee, after all, is beneficial and possibly brave in the right context. Rather, the coward is the product of his own ignorance of what the ultimate good. It is this ignorance--not instinct, per se--which causes him to put his immediate safety ahead of right action in battle. The ideal good for a courageous man is to pinpoint the right balance between fight and flight, and to spend his life aiming to achieve this. Instinct itself is subsumed in the larger question of what is good, for if the instinct is currently deficient, it merely needs more practice, more work, more education.That ideal courage exists for him to achieve, regardless of how weak the nerves he was given at birth. Because the ideal courage predates us, it shines like a star for us to aspire to, and not as a ball of gas made up of our own egotistical excrescences.
Nietzsche is the anti-Plato, and is the greatest of all ant-Platonists. Like the Word, Nietzsche has always existed. He appears as Callicles in Gorgias, claiming that the life of the invidious tyrant is better than the man of virtue's. He exists in Edward Gibbon, who cynically derides the Platonists for suggesting the immortality of the soul. He exists in William Blake, who spurns the higher obligations of man for the merely spiritual—that is to say, the ego, since spiritualism without the Spirit is nothing but solipsism. Nietzsche is merely the most brilliant of the Nietzscheans.
Is courage a virtue that can be taught? I would be vulgar and wrong to say that Nietzsche thought the senses could not be tamed into a kind of courage; accurate to say that Nietzsche disbelieved in any kind of Platonic virtue. The idea that a right mixture of fight and flight, of knowing and impulse, exists for the weak-willed man to aspire is anathema, the height of foolishness. Courageous is as courageous does. By raising this "virtue" up beyond the physical requirements of it--by making it a star to which even the untermenschen can aspire--we deceive the weak into thinking that courage or anything which Plato calls a virtue is something that can be taught. Plato fetishizes the mind, ignoring that fact that courage is more about brute force and--of course--will than any kind of learning. The Platonic idea of courage, which sees it as a good to be aspired to, is replaced by courage as an attribute of the strong-willed. And hence, we remove beyond good and evil...
The dramatic difference here. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche trusts the empirical, the physical, the demonstrable. The idea of deducing a higher Virtue from the material world is ludicrous. The material world is not an echo of a greater symphony, nor a shadow of a true object. The world is what it appears to be, without the idle philosophizing of Socrates or Plato. Man is an observing machine, but an inadequate one at that. His end is the will itself; no higher Good exists.
There's something, shall we say, sub-philosophical in jumping to the ad hominem at this point. But as the two competing assertions, Nietzsche's that no Good exists, and Plato's that one does, are what Kuhn would term a non-falsifiable paradigm, we have to take arguments where we can get them. The Platonist can retort to the empiricist that the empiricist is merely using a refined form of deduction. The Newtonian can battle the Einsteinian, draping his theory in more and more ornate bells and whistles until he can convince himself that relativity theory is false. In science, these paradigms are only good for the purpose we derive from them as predictive engines; in philosophy, we might try the same thing. And what is to be said of a philosophy that drove its greatest proponent to incestuous insanity?
The Platonic philosophy gives man his due. Much is made of "faith" in both religious and non-religious contexts, but the first and most important kind of faith extant is that which says to a man that what he perceives in his senses actually exists. A man who didn't believe this has no reason not to put his hand on a burning stove, or step in front of a moving car. This is essentially as far as Nietzsche goes, where Plato takes the next step. Man's thoughts mean something. Ideas, patterns, relationships, form something higher than the mere matter which forms these relations. Existing at a higher level than matter, these relations lead man to contemplate higher relations, relations which govern the whole of the makeup the universe. And the highest organizer, the grandest conceiver of ideas, is God Himself.
One of the greatest faults of modern Christianity is its ability to ignore the fact that belief in Man must predate a belief in God. To believe we can perceive God, to believe that we are in any way able to partake of His gifts, presumes a belief in man's ration. If man is but a feeling, craving, desiring being, none of his senses can cohere into anything which suggests a higher power. If man's reason did not exist, God could not be perceived, of course. But if man's reason did not exist we would have no morality, no perceptible order, no way to abide by the Will of God.
How much of faith is really a faith in reason? A faith in man’s ability to discern the world, to let his logic take him to the heights of all being and knowledge. Faith in God is a faith in man. Plato makes the assertion that man matters. From the power of reason alone, man can brave the heights of heaven, so long as he follows his reason.
This Big Idea has shaped Western Civilization in ways we don't now appreciate. The chaos and misanthropy which characterizes the modern age is largely the result of unmooring ourselves from Plato's teachings. If only we could go back!
September 1, 2021
This volume contains:
Protagoras
Phaedo
Symposium
The Republic
Benjamin Jowett translation used for each. Jowett translation is a common translation used for collections of Plato, and while it is well done artistically, it has its problems with accuracy. If you want the best collection I'd go with Plato Complete Works edited by Cooper.
This volume contains first an early book written by Plato, then three others from his 'middle' period. The latter three are considered essential Plato.
Protagoras - Interesting first pick. Unlike other commonly first picked works of Plato like the ones surrounding Socrates trial, death, and execution, this portrays a young Socrates arguing with the sophist Protagoras. Protagoras is Socrates' elder in this, and it shows because this is one of the few dialogues by Plato where Socrates is out-argued by his opponent. Socrates is skeptical that virtue can be taught, and Protagoras gives an excellent speech combining philosophical argument with Greek myth showing how Socrates is wrong and virtue can be taught. This moment has a profound influence of Plato's Socrates, changing his life as he would later go on do philosophy with the idea that he can teach virtue through words.
The quality goes down from here as Socrates gets upset that Protagoras will not argue the way he wishes to argue, using his usual question and answer method where the interlocutor gives short responses. When Socrates is finally able to convince the crowd to let him have it his way, he turns around and gives the longest speech in the book by far, becoming what he accuses of sophists. They then argue what courage is and if the different virtues are one united whole or separate things. Their conclusions aren't very interesting.
Phaedo - One of Plato's classics portraying his views on life and death, theory of forms, and epistemology. He also has Socrates give his account of what the afterlife is like, and his theory on what earth is. This argument takes place on Socrates' death bed, ending with his drinking of hemlock. I personally can't stand this dialogue and find Plato's views on life and death sickening, but it is required reading if you want to understand Plato.
Symposium - Plato's most well written book as literature and most likely of all his works to entertain those not interested in philosophy. Rather than question and answer style, it contains a series of speeches given by different notable Athenian men at the Symposium, a place of drinking and partying. Someone crashes the party at the end completely drunk, and gives a rant on how his love for Socrates brings him suffering. This is fitting because the subject of the book is love.
The Republic - Plato's masterpiece. The republic is what takes up most of this volume as it is 10 books whereas each of the previous was a book each. Follows the story of Socrates and Plato's brothers as they discuss what Justice is. An account is given of what they consider an ideal city, and then use this ideal city as a metaphor for the ideally just soul.
Protagoras
Phaedo
Symposium
The Republic
Benjamin Jowett translation used for each. Jowett translation is a common translation used for collections of Plato, and while it is well done artistically, it has its problems with accuracy. If you want the best collection I'd go with Plato Complete Works edited by Cooper.
This volume contains first an early book written by Plato, then three others from his 'middle' period. The latter three are considered essential Plato.
Protagoras - Interesting first pick. Unlike other commonly first picked works of Plato like the ones surrounding Socrates trial, death, and execution, this portrays a young Socrates arguing with the sophist Protagoras. Protagoras is Socrates' elder in this, and it shows because this is one of the few dialogues by Plato where Socrates is out-argued by his opponent. Socrates is skeptical that virtue can be taught, and Protagoras gives an excellent speech combining philosophical argument with Greek myth showing how Socrates is wrong and virtue can be taught. This moment has a profound influence of Plato's Socrates, changing his life as he would later go on do philosophy with the idea that he can teach virtue through words.
The quality goes down from here as Socrates gets upset that Protagoras will not argue the way he wishes to argue, using his usual question and answer method where the interlocutor gives short responses. When Socrates is finally able to convince the crowd to let him have it his way, he turns around and gives the longest speech in the book by far, becoming what he accuses of sophists. They then argue what courage is and if the different virtues are one united whole or separate things. Their conclusions aren't very interesting.
Phaedo - One of Plato's classics portraying his views on life and death, theory of forms, and epistemology. He also has Socrates give his account of what the afterlife is like, and his theory on what earth is. This argument takes place on Socrates' death bed, ending with his drinking of hemlock. I personally can't stand this dialogue and find Plato's views on life and death sickening, but it is required reading if you want to understand Plato.
Symposium - Plato's most well written book as literature and most likely of all his works to entertain those not interested in philosophy. Rather than question and answer style, it contains a series of speeches given by different notable Athenian men at the Symposium, a place of drinking and partying. Someone crashes the party at the end completely drunk, and gives a rant on how his love for Socrates brings him suffering. This is fitting because the subject of the book is love.
The Republic - Plato's masterpiece. The republic is what takes up most of this volume as it is 10 books whereas each of the previous was a book each. Follows the story of Socrates and Plato's brothers as they discuss what Justice is. An account is given of what they consider an ideal city, and then use this ideal city as a metaphor for the ideally just soul.
March 20, 2025
The dialog and arguments are laborious, but I recognize that it’s the cognitive architecture established by Plato's Republic that is key to understanding the Western mindset. Argument. Counter-argument. Good faith and bad faith arguments. It’s the win-lose architecture of our politics and courtrooms. It was so laborious, I did not read it to the end. I didn't need to. The arguments, not the content, are the point.
September 9, 2021
ok so this book gave me a good idea of Hellenic philosophy and historical context. Socrates is 99% of this book, he's ahead of his time and wise. However prolix as he may be.
Protagoras lost steam towards the end, had to wade through it a little. Symposium was brief and more of a story, a fun read. Phaedo was genuinely fantastic, really enjoyed it. The republic has some great ideas from chapter 7 on, but between 3 and 7 it really drags for me; discussing what a 'perfect' state is.
Look I deffo think it's overrated, but also very glad I read it. Just know better reading exists, but no one will make the logical leaps that Socrates made (both bad and good). For example, his idea on Women was very half-baked, dedicated only a couple of pages, but spoke about great length about justice, with just about as many historical examples as in a chapter like Symposium. Phaedo should be read by everyone though, then the republic(just for his ideas on governance) then the symposium, and finally protarogas.
Protagoras lost steam towards the end, had to wade through it a little. Symposium was brief and more of a story, a fun read. Phaedo was genuinely fantastic, really enjoyed it. The republic has some great ideas from chapter 7 on, but between 3 and 7 it really drags for me; discussing what a 'perfect' state is.
Look I deffo think it's overrated, but also very glad I read it. Just know better reading exists, but no one will make the logical leaps that Socrates made (both bad and good). For example, his idea on Women was very half-baked, dedicated only a couple of pages, but spoke about great length about justice, with just about as many historical examples as in a chapter like Symposium. Phaedo should be read by everyone though, then the republic(just for his ideas on governance) then the symposium, and finally protarogas.
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June 6, 2013I found the book to be very profound and enlightening at the same time when it comes to issues of religion, love and many others including the political issues. The chapters/books I enjoyed include Phaedo, Symphossium and The Republic(s).
July 24, 2013
Beautifully written, incredibly foundational, even though the process today that they are exhibiting is more basic. Protagoras was difficult, but after getting used to the title it begins to flow incredibly well
January 22, 2009
More than a little boring.
January 28, 2013
Enjoyed having several of his works in one book. Still ploding through the Republic. Tot stuck on book 3. On hold at the moment, will pick it up at some point in the future.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews