Plato's Allegory of the Charioteer

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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.

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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.

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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.

John Holbo on 10/02/2009 at 12:29 AM in illustration | Permalink

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Enjoy your illustrations! Clear enough to relate to the topic but 'turned' just enough to open up more than one visual interpretation. Congrats on the book!

Posted by: Brett J | 12/18/2009 at 10:23 PM

Our soul is not one entity. It should be viewed as a composite; it comprises many other elements that can affect the soul and vice versa. Everyday,our soul (charioteer) is facing constant difficulty in deciding what is right and how to do the right thing and do it right. It is just like the charioteer who tries to guide the black horse to stay on course with the white horse. If the charioteer fails to guide the black horse, the two horses will go on different paths and the result will be an ugly truth of a broken chariot; the broken soul.

Posted by: Thou Reaksmey | 01/21/2010 at 01:20 PM

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