An Introduction to Plato's Republic
by Julia Annas
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Book Summary Information
Author: Julia AnnasEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1981-06-18
ISBN: 0198274297
Number of pages: 370
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of An Introduction to Plato's Republic
Book Review: Better look elsewhere!
Summary: 2 Stars
This book grew out of Annas' experience of teaching Plato's Republic to students in a course that's all about evaluating Plato's arguments for their philosophical merit. She aims for this goal so single-mindedly as to deprive herself from providing to her audience any further profits a book on Plato's Republic may provide - profits such as, fuel the reader's sheer enjoyment of reading Plato, or learn at a more accurate level what Plato's views were.
For instance, this book makes a case for Plato being a mysogynist (women-hater) and favoring dictatorship of the (almost) worst kind. Unless you happen to favor those views yourself, this won't add much to making Plato an enjoyable read for you. What's worse, however, is that the book doesn't actually spend sufficient time arguing for those interpretations, let alone addressing countervailing ones. And on that level it achieves the very opposite of what it set out to do, namely make people engage critically with a set text.
You see, the idea might have been to make people read Annas so as to engage with Plato critically. The problem however is that people who aren't critically minded to begin with won't start to become so simply by being told - a point Plato's Socrates was fully aware of but this book (apparently) isn't. Rather, what I repeatedly find in student essays on the Republic is that they swallow Annas's claims, enjoy the short lived pleasure of scoring cheap points in the game called "acing your exam essay", without ever engaging critically with either Annas or (for that matter) Plato.
To see what a vast difference an author can make to encourage readers to engage with his book critically, have a look at Burnyeat's "Theaetetus", a fine work on many levels, and an outstanding example of what writing on Plato can be without being mindless praise.
Personally I'm glad there are more rewarding books to recommend to students of Plato's Republic these days, and if you're interested at all, I suggest you have a look at the multi-authored "Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic" (2007) and "Blackwell Guide to Plato's Republic" (2006).
Summary of An Introduction to Plato's Republic
This interpretive introduction provides unique insight into Plato's Republic. Stressing Plato's desire to stimulate philosophical thinking in his readers, Julia Annas here demonstrates the coherence of his main moral argument on the nature of justice, and expounds related concepts of education, human motivation, knowledge and understanding. In a clear systematic fashion, this book shows that modern moral philosophy still has much to learn from Plato's attempt to move the focus from questions of what acts the just person ought to perform to the more profound questions of what sort of person the just person ought to be.Greek Books
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