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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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« September 2009 | Main | December 2009 »

October 2009

Plato's Allegory of the Charioteer

Tomorrow I'm lecturing on Plato and psychology. (I'm having the kids read Jonathan Haidt, whom I quote in the book, in the Meno intro chapter.) Anyway, Haidt quotes Plato's famous metaphor, from Phaedrus (246a - 254e). The soul is like a charioteer having a bit of trouble. The horse on the right is noble and white. The dark, shaggy one, on the left, is deaf as a post and yields only to the whip. These correspond to the honor-loving and appetitive parts of the soul, respectively. The charioteer is, of course, reason. And there are (sort of) a couple versions of the myth, so maybe the horses have wings.

I've been meaning to make an illustration to go with this one for a while and I finally got around to it tonight. I think it turned out alright.

Chariot2

on 10/02/2009 at 12:29 AM in illustration | | Comments (109) | TrackBack (0)

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