Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share William H. F. Altman, "Ascent to the Beautiful: Plato the Teacher and the Pre-Republic Dialogues from Protagoras to Symposium" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
William H. F. Altman, "Ascent to the Beautiful: Plato the Teacher and the Pre-Republic Dialogues from Protagoras to Symposium" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020)
With Ascent to the Beautiful, William H. F. Altman completes his five-volume reconstruction of the Reading Order of the Platonic dialogues. This book covers Plato’s elementary dialogues, grappling from the start with F. D. E. Schleiermacher, who created an enduring prejudice against the works Plato wrote for beginners. Recognized in antiquity as the place to begin, Alcibiades Major was banished from the canon but it was not alone: with the exception of Protagoras and Symposium, Schleiermacher rejected as inauthentic all seven of the dialogues this book places between them. In order to prove their authenticity, Altman illuminates their interconnections and shows how each prepares the student to move beyond self-interest to gallantry, and thus from the doctrinal intellectualism Aristotle found in Protagoras to the emergence of philosophy as intermediate between wisdom and ignorance in Symposium, en route to Diotima’s ascent to the transcendent Beautiful. Based on the hypothesis that it was his own eminently teachable dialogues that Plato taught—and bequeathed to posterity as his Academy’s eternal curriculum—Ascent to the Beautiful helps the reader to imagine the Academy as a school.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
View all episodes
By New Books Network
4.1
1313 ratings
With Ascent to the Beautiful, William H. F. Altman completes his five-volume reconstruction of the Reading Order of the Platonic dialogues. This book covers Plato’s elementary dialogues, grappling from the start with F. D. E. Schleiermacher, who created an enduring prejudice against the works Plato wrote for beginners. Recognized in antiquity as the place to begin, Alcibiades Major was banished from the canon but it was not alone: with the exception of Protagoras and Symposium, Schleiermacher rejected as inauthentic all seven of the dialogues this book places between them. In order to prove their authenticity, Altman illuminates their interconnections and shows how each prepares the student to move beyond self-interest to gallantry, and thus from the doctrinal intellectualism Aristotle found in Protagoras to the emergence of philosophy as intermediate between wisdom and ignorance in Symposium, en route to Diotima’s ascent to the transcendent Beautiful. Based on the hypothesis that it was his own eminently teachable dialogues that Plato taught—and bequeathed to posterity as his Academy’s eternal curriculum—Ascent to the Beautiful helps the reader to imagine the Academy as a school.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More shows like New Books in Ancient History
View all
The LRB Podcast
289 Listeners
The Gray Area with Sean Illing
10,741 Listeners
In Our Time
5,433 Listeners
Ancient Warfare Podcast
539 Listeners
New Books in Critical Theory
149 Listeners
Literature and History
1,405 Listeners
Philosophy For Our Times
306 Listeners
Ancient Greece Declassified
498 Listeners
The Hellenistic Age Podcast
456 Listeners
Hermitix
344 Listeners
Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
7,055 Listeners
The Ezra Klein Show
16,072 Listeners
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
648 Listeners
Biblical Time Machine
213 Listeners
The Opinions
547 Listeners