Reason and Persuasion: Welcome to the official site, View or Download the Whole Book!

Here it is. Yes, a whole book about Plato! Three dialogues, Euthyphro, Meno, Republic book I, translated by Belle Waring, with commentary and cartoony illustrations by John Holbo.

We're publishing with Pearson Asia. I negotiated to reserve the e-rights, with the intention of offering it freely in this manner (blessed confluence of promotion and scholarly/classroom usability.) If you click on the thing you see below, you will not only get a full page view, with various display options but a download option, if you prefer to read a PDF off-line. (I'll say a bit more about availability options and restrictions at the end of this post.) It's hosted via Issuu.com - and a very lovely Flash-based interface they have got:

If anyone has issues with Issuu, please tell me. Seems to work very well.

The whole thing is 388 pages, approx. 20 megs. Like I said, feel free to view and download. What you are getting is actually the final, pre-publication draft. It's done so far as I'm concerned, but if we catch little things in the next week or so, they will be corrected. (I do SO hope nothing big turns out to be wrong with it.) Since I am still editing, I hope some of you will see fit to provide useful feedback. I hope a lot more of you find it useful, enjoyable, get something out of it. And maybe even a few wise heads will see fit to adopt it for course purposes - improve the souls of the young, that sort of thing. Very traditional. Email me about that if you are potentially interested.

Feel free to link - please! link! Link directly to the Issuu.com book page, if you like. But please do me the favor of linking here as well, at the pre-publication stage. I want people to know what the deal is.

The sidebar explains. Basically, I have a few days left to make final final revisions. So you've got to get back to me quick with caught typos, misplaced Stephanus pages (I think a few might have shifted in the last edit, drat) and bright ideas (sorry, this is a lot to ask, and not really the philosopher's way. That thing Wittgenstein said about how philosophers should address each other - 'take your time!' - forget about that. We are going to press.)

Even after that deadline passes, I would still like to collect critiques and comments and review-type response to post here.

Because it's nice to feel reviewed.

Also, I have this idea about introductory texts: they are introductory, I have noticed. They ignore stuff, that's their job, but it would be nice if introductory texts came equipped with little Socratic daimons that said 'no'. Students need to read something straightforward, can't be expected to handle all the sharp elbows of scholarly back-and-forth right at the start. But it would be nice if students didn't just believe that they read. So I'm going to try to collect little critical notes about the individual chapters - here's what got left out, this is too simple, there's an alternative reading that I said nothing about. For an alternative view look here. I'll write some of them myself. Would you like to help?

Let me start us off with a note about chapter 1, which is very short. (My later chapters err in too long department, perhaps.) I talk about early, middle and late dialogues and explain that ours are early (Euthyphro) to early-middle (Meno, Republic book I). I call this a 'standard' view, when really is more the Gregory Vlastos late 20th Century analytic developmental model. There's a good article on Socrates by Debra Nails at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, containing the following paragraph:

It is a risky business to say where ancient philosophy is now, but an advantage of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is that authors are allowed, nay, encouraged to update their entries to reflect recent scholarship and sea changes in their topics. For many analytic philosophers, John Cooper (1997, xiv) sounded the end of the developmentalist era when he described the early- and middle-period dialogue distinctions as “an unsuitable basis for bringing anyone to the reading of these works. To use them in that way is to announce in advance the results of a certain interpretation of the dialogues and to canonize that interpretation under the guise of a presumably objective order of composition—when in fact no such order is objectively known. And it thereby risks prejudicing an unwary reader against the fresh, individual reading that these works demand.” When he added, “it is better to relegate thoughts about chronology to the secondary position they deserve and to concentrate on the literary and philosophical content of the works, taken on their own and in relation to the others,” he proposed peace between the literary contextualist and analytic developmentalist camps. As in any peace agreement, it takes some time for all the combatants to accept that the conflict has ended—but that is where we are.

Maybe it's because I'm a Berkeley graduate. I'm still sort of in the Vlastos mold, although I do see the problems. Maybe I should add another page to chapter 1, quoting the John Cooper bit? What do people think about the state of the debate?

Finally, a word about availability options and display issues. The idea, obviously, is to make as generous an e-offering as possible, consistent with reasonable expectations of paper sales. Issuu is pretty simple but I am still puzzling out a few things. The search box doesn't seem to be working. (I must be doing something wrong.) Of course, you can download the PDF and search it just fine; that's a workaround.

On the other hand, you can't print the PDF - hey, you are supposed to buy the book - but you can print individual page spreads in the Issuu display mode. It's convenient to be able to print a few pages that you need for some legitimate purpose, I appreciate. (I'm counting on people not hitting the print button 200 times, over a period of hours, to save the cost of a paperback. Help me prove to my publisher that I'm right, that people won't do that.)

A small thing: the Issuu display composes the document spreads wrongly - not the way they will be printed, at any rate - and I haven't figured out how to fix it without getting the page numbering wrong, which would be worse. It doesn't really matter for viewing online, but the chapters are (mostly) supposed to start on the right-hand page. And the page numbers are supposed to be on the outside, not the inside of the page. If you view it in Acrobat Reader, in the two-up mode, you'll see it the way it is supposed to look. (Not a big deal, this discrepancy, but annoying to someone - me, for example - who labored to design the spreads just-so.)

I'll get it worked out by the time the thing is actually printed and for sale. I am opening this site early in part to kick the tires at issuu and make sure it all basically works. (Also, because I want people to know we exist in time to order the book for their classes. We exist! You can get our book by mid-August! Details to follow!)

Issuu seems really good so far. I'm thinking it will be really convenient for educational purposes. It's not just that you can embed the document on your course blog, say, for students to see. You can actually embed the document on the page you want your students to open to. So you can make a post about p. 183, just for example, and make an embed or direct link so that it opens right to page 183. Neat! What do you think?

OK, scratch that. I can make an embed (I could make it even smaller, since it's not actually readable at this size, but I won't bother with that for now):

But apparently I can't make a direct URL link to a page within the book. Oh well. (I'll mess around and see whether that's really how it goes.) But that's still pretty useful, at least for the way I teach my classes..

Comments

[jcpoteet]

I was curious as to why you chose those three and not "Theatetus", but then I read the part about this was an introductory text. I look forward to reading this, thank you.

[jholbo]

yeah, I could plead concern for the delicate brains of the kiddies. But, honestly, I wouldn't feel confident writing a commentary on "Theatetus". (What about MY delicate brain?)

Thanks for commenting.

[Brock]

p. 10: "so said Friedrich Nietzsche (who had the moustache to prove it.)"

Final period should be outside the parentheses.

[Dave M]

"But it would be nice if students didn't just believe that they read."

Should that be "believe *what* they read," or are you making some point about skepticism?

[Brock]

Are you going to set up a Cafe Press store with T-shirts and such?

[jholbo]

Thanks Brock, I was thinking of turning the checker players into a coffee mug, yes. I really like it. (You want to make other suggestions of likely merch?)

Dave M. Yep, should be 'what'. (I'm not making some ingenious, superfine back-flip post-Derridean point about how 'there's nothing inside the text'. Although now that I think about it ...)

[The Modesto Kid]

when (at the end of Chapter 2) you call Plato "the writer, director and producer" of the dialogues, do you mean to suggest they were staged? I had no idea that was the case, if it is then I am kind of blown away. If it's not then you might want to reconsider "director and producer".

[jholbo]

"when (at the end of Chapter 2) you call Plato "the writer, director and producer" of the dialogues, do you mean to suggest they were staged?"

No, no, unblow your mind, Modesto. I was being metaphorical. I'm trying to emphasize two things: first, it's important to figure out what the dramatic function of this stuff might be. For those purposes, Plato is (but just on paper) the writer, director and producer (and maybe the star of the show, in his Socrates costume). The dialogues shouldn't just be read as essays that turned out to be plays, by some accident.

But I also wanted to nod to a famous fact (possibly apocryphal, so famous 'fact') that Plato aspired to be a dramatist but Socrates cured him of that. I like to think of Plato as someone with strong dramatic ambitions, who maybe feels a bit guilty and conflicted about the propriety of all that base stuff.

I'm trying to help him get in touch with his inner puppeteer with all these cartoons of mine. Good for the soul.

[The Modesto Kid]

Is an auxilliary verb missing here (p. 34)? "What if their prison had an echo which reach them"

[jholbo]

Yep. Something's wrong there. Probably 'could'. Or 'reached'. I'll consult the translator.

[The Modesto Kid]

What by the way possessed you to use a sans-serif font and to use bold face in place of italics? Or is that an artefact of the Issuu reader application? It definitely sticks in my head, but I'm not sure whether it is a pleasant sticking-in-my-head or an irritating one.

[jholbo]

There's a funny story about the font, Modesto. It's Hypatia Sans Pro and it doesn't have an italic version for the odd but sufficient reason that the project just never got done, apparently. The guy who was working on it went on to something else, and whoever is picking up the pieces isn't done picking. We've been waiting a year and a half.

You can read about it here.

http://blogs.adobe.com/typblography/2007/04/hypatia_sans.html

In comments, folks are banging on their keyboards for italics. You see me in there, way back in July of last year, inquiring when it will be available. I figured for sure it would exist by the time my book came out but we're still waiting. When the time came I thought about switching to another font but I really like Hypatia Sans and I was worried that italics often don't look good in screen displays, particularly at small sizes. They can really blind you. Since this work was supposed to have a major e-book life, I just stuck with the bold face option. It's kinda grown on me.

In a weird way, the fact that pros aren't using Hypatia Sans yet, because it's got no italics yet, means that my book has a distictive typographic look. (To reach for the silver lining that way.)

[Brad DeLong]

I thought the poet who dropped his shield and ran wasn't a Spartan but was rather Horace, who fought at Philippi for the Assassins against Antony and Octavian?

[jholbo]

Hi Brad, thanks again for the link, glad to see you here. The poet in question is Archilochus. Here's his wiki page which contains several fragments, including the one I referenced:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Archilochus

Some Saian mountaineer
Struts today with my shield.
I threw it down by a bush and ran
When the fighting got hot.
Life seemed somehow more precious.
It was a beautiful shield.
I know where I can buy another
Exactly like it, just as round.

There are several alternative versions quoted. He's also the guy who came up with the fox and hedgehog 'knows many things, knows one big thing' line, later made famous by Berlin.

It occurs to me that I don't know for sure whether he was Spartan, although he was Greek. I distinctly remember reading that he was exiled from Sparta. But that's not quite the same thing. Maybe he was visiting and got kicked out. I dunno. I should check.

[jholbo]

Oh, hey, here's my answer. He IS the poet quoted or referenced by Horace, as you say, and he wasn't Spartan. He was born in Paros. But he is said to have gotten himself kicked out of Sparta for writing this sort of thing. So I'd better make a minor edit. Here's the source:

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Archilocus

[Uri]

p.131, "sacrifice a young animal. A pig. Get it's blood" should be "get its blood".

[Kieran Setiya]

No helpful comments on the text, but this is just fantastic! Can't wait to see the print version, too.

[Brad DeLong]

With respect to the Return of the Archons...

I assume that the funky robed costumes worn in the Start Trek episode were not historical--were not in fact worn by the archons of Athens?

And I find myself confused about Greek kingshop. With respect to the king-archon--can you say a few words about basileus vs. wanax?

[jholbo]

Thanks Kieran! (Long time no chat, it's good to hear from you.

Brad, as to the funky costumes? I honestly don't know what you are supposed to wear as an archon. I think there are some representations of the basileus in a book I footnote, the one about the Panathenaic festival. There is at least one image of the basileus giving out prizes at an athletic competition or some such official function. He's just some guy, dressed like the others, if memory serves.

As to the basileus vs. wanax: in the next week or so I think I'll get around to posting my latest draft of my 'what would have happened in Euthyphro's case' paper. But that wouldn't really answer this question. As to basileus, my understanding is that it's a bit mysterious where it came from. It originally referred to someone under the wanax - possibly some sort of sub-lord or magistrate, in a feudal way? But somehow between Homer and the 7th Century, the basileus got promoted to the position formerly held by wanax: king. Then, by the time of Plato, 'basileus' really just names a city official, elected and serving a term of a year. It's like the guy got demoted back down. Just one of those weird linguistic drifts.

[Brad DeLong]

And "tyrannos"? I mean, Oedipus is a tyrannos, and neither a wanax nor a basileus...

[Brock]

p. 102 "I don't think just anyone would be able to what you are doing."

s/b/ "to do what you are doing."

The checker-players is my favorite illustration also. I'd certainly buy a T-shirt, or coffee mug.

[Brock]

p. 118 "Where there justice..."

s/b "Where there is justice"

[The Modesto Kid]

This might be off-base but as regards the question "How many dancing cows?" I don't think there is any possible answer other than "three". If the question were something more like "how many pictures?" then you could answer "one" -- since there are three instances of a single picture. I don't think it makes sense to say there are three instances of a single dancing cow -- those pictures are not cow-instances, they are picture-instances, and the only way of understanding "how many dancing cows?" is as "how many dancing cows are depicted in the following picture?" to which "one" would not be a meaningful answer. I think the example is confusing as presented.

[jholbo]

Thanks for continuing with the proofing!

Modesto, I think what you are saying is basically that you find platonism inconceivable, which is a perfectly respectable position. But it does mean I couldn't very well come up with a less confusing example.

Suppose, instead of a dancing cow, I had three images of Marilyn Monroe - maybe holding her dress down while standing over a blowing street grate, for extra titillation. How may actresses? You would answer 1. Because you would recognize there's only 1 Marilyn. Even if I showed you 3 slightly different shots from the blowing street gate scene. (So there would be no question of it being, literally, three instances of the same picture. It's three different pictures of one actress.) But then, surely, regarding the three dancing cows, you can also answer 1. These are three pictures of one thing. Namely, the Form of Cowness. (Imperfectly rendered, to be sure.)

If I showed you three cows and asked: how many KINDS of thing, you would have no problem answering 1. Plato thinks questions about kinds are the only intelligible questions (that's slightly oversimple but basically right.) Questions about sensible particulars just break apart into contradictions. So if you want to answer 'how many things?' in an intelligible way, you have to hear it as a KIND question.

In short, I don't think it's the example. I think that, in order to understand Plato, you just have to keep thinking 'ok, this is bizarre, but somehow I have to at least understand how it is supposed to make sense, if I'm going to understand Plato.'

Make sense?

[The Modesto Kid]

Actually I think 3 images of Marilyn Monroe with the question "How many Marilyn Monroes?" would be a way more easily grasped illustration. It might open you up to copyright questions though, alas.

Something funny: as I was reading your idea of Socrates addressing Carnegus on p. 65, I was thinking "This would be a really good place to point out how Socrates' arguments often rely on ambiguity in language." Turn the page and find you talking about ambiguity in language!