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  • Yes, you can! Just click the image below for a full-screen page view. You can read the book online. Nice, flash-based interface. Very readable. You can also download this fine Plato text from the Issuu site itself. (That requires that you sign up for Issuu, but it's free and won't take but a minute.) If you download the PDF you will find that it is print-locked but otherwise fully functional.

About the Book

  • Politics and persuasion, reason and religion, science and success, appearance and reality, belief and knowledge, ethics and egoism. Reason and Persuasion provides a new look at old issues through the lens of three classic dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno and Republic, Book I. These dialogues appear here in fresh translations, by Belle Waring, with general introduction, commentary chapters and illustrations by John Holbo. The text is lively, accessible, and intended for use as an introduction to philosophy, but is substantive enough to be of interest to the more advanced students as well.

    Reason and Persuasion asks the question philosophers and non- philosophers have been asking each other, and themselves, from the start: why should I listen to you?

About the Authors

  • John Holbo is an assistant professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore. He is married to Belle Waring, the translator, who got at MA in classics at the University of California, Berkeley. John's CV is here. Belle spends much of her time these days refurbishing vintage furniture. (Here are the pictures to prove it.) We blog at John & Belle Have A Blog. Also at Crooked Timber. John also blogs at the Valve. (Are you starting to see a pattern?) John is also publishing his webcomic, Squid & Owl, as a Flickr set. Updates daily.

About This Site

  • John Holbo is your webmaster and host. But I'm married to Belle so I can pass along questions and comments about the translations efficiently. We call it 'spousecasting'.

    I'm planning to maintain this blog as a permanent supplement/appendix to the book. It will contain updates, corrections, free teaching materials, links, that sort of thing. We're hoping to collect informal reviews and commentary on the text by others - by you, maybe. The formal sort are welcome, too, of course. One problem with introductions is that they are, well, too ... introductory in a lot of ways. They ignore stuff, proceed as if things are simple. That's their job. But I'm thinking it might be nice to collect a bunch of 'here's what Holbo leaves out of chapter 4' type pieces. It would be nice for me to be able to point students to that sort of thing.

Reason and Persuasion Illustrations

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Mind and Manners

To busy for more posts, so I'll just mention that I have a post up at Crooked Timber that is, to some degree, a reflection about how pesky Socratic dialectical stylings are received, inside and outside of philosophy departments.

on 06/10/2009 at 11:43 AM in Elswhere |

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Posted by: Ayano | 09/20/2012 at 07:46 AM

Here is an example of how Idea peranstsice pays off! It is well known that less than 5% of believers who attend Church share their Faith. For years this has troubled me and probably every Pastor who wants to build a foward moving Church. To make a long story short, in 2002 while on a missions trip to Haiti, I got an idea of how to address this problem. For 4 years I developed the idea and wrote it into a Training Manual. I then presented it to our Church leadership. To my disappointment, they couldn't grasp the concept. So, I began using the idea on my own and it was very successful. So, I refined the appearance of the 3 ring manual and presented it again this past June. For some reason the response at the board meeting was unamiously infavor of implementing it in our Church. Pastor has given me access to everything I need to make it a success. It is a Training Program targeted at New or Unskilled believers or those who don't feel comfortable or qualified to share with others. Our Pastor is now very happy, because after 4 classes we have 38 new believers actively sharing their Faith. PTL.

Posted by: Differentfor | 09/22/2012 at 01:16 PM

Joe, thank you for effectively, over-delivering a clear udntrseanding of how to apply The 18 Most Powerful Words of Persuasion. The importance of immediatley being able to use the techniques taught in this teaching are already causing positive results with the people I serve.Beyond the above training, every teaching and training I have attended with you and your staff/associates at Optimus International has been done with a focus of developing the individual into their best qualities. Developing leadership skills from the heart is so powerful and naturally attracts quality people. I love it. I also want to thank you for providing excellence in the many free trainings available to us and beyond that the most cost effective, how to trainings and tools out there that produce results.You are a unique person, in fact, my wife and I would like to adopt you.LOL. Love your sense of humor also.

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