Plato's Republic as a Philosophical Drama on Doing Well

(Hardback)

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Transcending dominant debates of whether Plato's Republic is about the ideal state, the soul, art, or education, Ivor Ludlam's analysis treats the dialogue as pure conversation. Returning to the original Greek, Ludlam examines the dialogue both in its details and in its entirety. The result is a holistic interpretation wherein Ludlam reveals how each character becomes a paradigm for an aspect of the Republic's central themethe apparent good. Ultimately, it is the individual aspects of apparent good that the characters represent that determines the final course of the dialogue. Revisioning the central theme of the Republic through the motivations and interactions of its characters, Ludlam provides an innovative, holistic, and dramatic analysis of this foundational work.

Reviews

Ivor Ludlam succeeds in unifying the Republics multiplicity of ideas and themes, and in taming what might otherwise appear a great tangle. Ludlams ingenious organizing principle is the correspondence between the dialogues characters and the political types Socrates describes. Treating the dialogues philosophical content as unfolding through its drama, this work honors Plato as a philosopher whose identity stubbornly resists submersion in that of any of the characters he limns. In the Republic, Plato is thus able to present his unique and inspiring vision of philosophy as the dialectical study of dialectic. -- Roslyn Weiss, Lehigh University

Author Bio

Ivor Ludlam is lecturer for Latin and Greek studies at the University of Haifa.