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Laws

Plato

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Plato As Law Giver 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I read this book as part of my research into Plato himself.

It's hard for me to see how relevant a book like this is today. Plato's world was very different than today. People owned slaves, there was no internet or mass communications, Christianity didn't even exist yet, etc..

However it did provide some of the insights I was looking for about Plato himself.

Plato's writings have a smooth quality. St. Augustine called Plato's philosophy very 'clear'. Reading his works can almost be like a sort of religious experience since he often talks about the various mythological gods and God Himself. A book carries the spirit of the author I guess.

Plato believed in reincarnation and the law of karma. For example he felt that the death penalty is a blessing in disguise for incorrigible criminals since it prevents them from contaminating their souls with even more evil.

I feel this book shows the influence of two things that were very important for Plato; his belief in Atlantis and the books in the old testament of the bible that talk about the details of those laws that were given from on high. These two things were always there deep in his thoughts.

Atlantis was a utopian society at first and it seems that for all of his life Plato was trying to recreate this ideal society. But I doubt that he could have imagined the information that came out in the 1900s from the great Edgar Cayce (Osiris). Sometimes when people see flying saucers those are our ancestors from Atlantis travelling through time.

It is not a coincidence that fate chose Plato to preserve the legend of Atlantis for future generations. He was there on Atlantis himself at the very beginning.

Interestingly the author of this translation doesn't agree that The Laws shows how Plato became more realistic when he realized that the idealistic society described in The Republic could never become a reality. That is a common theory that many people believe.

Rather he feels Plato would have known that The Republic could never beome a reality.

I think the next thing I'll read about Plato is a biography as part of my ongoing research.

Jeff Marzano

The Atlantis Dialogue: Plato's Original Story of the Lost City, Continent, Empire, Civilization

Ufo...Contact from Planet Iarga

The Giza Power Plant : Technologies of Ancient Egypt

Edgar Cayce's Egypt: Psychic Revelations on the Most Fascinating Civilization Ever Known

Initiation

Initiation in the Great Pyramid (Astara's Library of Mystical Classics)

Edgar Cayce's Story of the Old Testament From the Birth of Souls to the Death of Moses

Editorial Review:

In The Laws, Plato describes in fascinating detail a comprehensive system of legislation in a small agricultural utopia he named Magnesia. His laws not only govern crime and punishment but also form a code of conduct for all aspects of life in his ideal state—from education, sports, and religion to sexual behavior, marriage, and drinking parties. Plato sets out a plan for the day-to-day rule of Magnesia, administered by citizens and elected officials, with supreme power held by a Council. Although Plato’s views that citizens should act in complete obedience to the law have been read as totalitarian, The Laws nonetheless constitutes a highly impressive program for the reform of society and provides a crucial insight into the mind of one of classical Greece’s foremost thinkers.

Symposium (Oxford World's Classics)

Plato

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The Wit and Wisdom of Love 5 out of 5 stars.
24 of 29 people found this review helpful.

Plato's "Symposium" will always be read because there will always be people who question the nature of Love. Agathon's dinner party is the scene of a conversation between a small group of men, who go around the table offering their views on Love. What does Love mean to us to-day? Reading over the responses of the dinner-guests and their host, we find the same range of answers in Ancient Greece that we are likely to find now.

Phaedrus and Pausanias are utilitarians and materialists. Phaedrus looks at love between people and a proto-Burkean love for government and state. Pausanias complicates the argument, saying that there are two different kinds of love, one which is common and one which is heavenly - yet still oriented towards the real and the tangible. Eryximachus is a proto-Swedenborg, trying to reconcile or harmonize the two kinds of love.

The jewels of Plato's "Symposium" are Aristophanes and Socrates. Aristophanes gives us the profoundly moving depiction of Love as a fundamental human need, a desire for completion. For a writer of comedy, whose aim as an art form is forgiveness and acceptance, Aristophanes's explanation is no surprise, though its depth is amazing. While women are generally discounted throughout the "Symposium," not only does Socrates, as we might expect, completely astound his audience (both inside the book and out) with his progressively logical and ascendant view of Love, but he also does it through the voice of a woman, Diotima. When we realize that Socrates is a character in this fiction, and that his words originate in a woman, the egalitarianism and wisdom of Plato the author truly shines forth, like the absolute beauty he claims as the ultimate goal of Love.

Was Plato a feminist? I don't know. I do know that the "Symposium" is a tremendous book. I picked it up and did not stop reading it until I was finished. The style of the Penguin translation is smooth, with a lighthearted tone that can make you forget that you are reading philosophy. Plato's comedic masterpiece in the "Symposium" is the character of Alcibiades, who provides the work a fitting end. Get the "Symposium" and read it now. You cannot help but Love it...in a Platonic sort of way.

Editorial Review:

In his celebrated masterpiece, Symposium, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC. The guests--including the comic poet Aristophanes and Plato's mentor Socrates--each deliver a short speech in praise of love. The sequence of dazzling speeches culminates in Socrates' famous account of the views of Diotima, a prophetess who taught him that love is our means of trying to attain goodness, and a brilliant sketch of Socrates himself by a drunken Alcibiades, the most popular and notorious Athenian of the time. Engaging the reader on every page, this new translation conveys the power, humor, and pathos of Plato's creation and is complemented by full explanatory notes and an illuminating introduction.

Small Talk: More Jazz Chants

Carolyn Graham

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Exellent teaching pronunciation book for ESL/EFL learners 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 17 people found this review helpful.

I am a Korean MATESOL student studing in the US. I have heard that Grahamn's Jazz chant is very good ESL source,and I have used her chants in my classes in Korea. The Jazz chant is very helpful in teaching rhythm and flow that English cotains. However the Jazz chants I have used before was just chants. They didn't have any guide lines. However,what drove me to attempt to write review of this book is that while I was looking for a book for pronunciation micro teaching, I happened to find this book in the library(Actually I didn't know this book was what my professor recommanded in class until I went over my notebook couple of minutes ago!) This book is very well organized and presents clear lesson points. It is definately wonderful to teach oral skills to English learners with fun. Not only does this book present chants but also has written exercises. I strongly recommand this book to ESL/EFL teachers.

Editorial Review:

This is a collection of jazz chants, recorded with live music by world-famous jazz musicians, designed to practice useful language functions.

The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature

Pierre Hadot

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Editorial Review:

Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago the Greek thinker Heraclitus supposedly uttered the cryptic words "Phusis kruptesthai philei." How the aphorism, usually translated as "Nature loves to hide," has haunted Western culture ever since is the subject of this engaging study by Pierre Hadot. Taking the allegorical figure of the veiled goddess Isis as a guide, and drawing on the work of both the ancients and later thinkers such as Goethe, Rilke, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, Hadot traces successive interpretations of Heraclitus' words. Over time, Hadot finds, "Nature loves to hide" has meant that all that lives tends to die; that Nature wraps herself in myths; and (for Heidegger) that Being unveils as it veils itself. Meanwhile the pronouncement has been used to explain everything from the opacity of the natural world to our modern angst.

From these kaleidoscopic exegeses and usages emerge two contradictory approaches to nature: the Promethean, or experimental-questing, approach, which embraces technology as a means of tearing the veil from Nature and revealing her secrets; and the Orphic, or contemplative-poetic, approach, according to which such a denuding of Nature is a grave trespass. In place of these two attitudes Hadot proposes one suggested by the Romantic vision of Rousseau, Goethe, and Schelling, who saw in the veiled Isis an allegorical expression of the sublime. "Nature is art and art is nature," Hadot writes, inviting us to embrace Isis and all she represents: art makes us intensely aware of how completely we ourselves are not merely surrounded by nature but also part of nature.

(20070729)

The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy

Martha Craven Nussbaum

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Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This book is a study of ancient Greek views about 'moral luck'. It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interelated treatment of both literary and philosophical texts. In a close analysis of three tragedies, and works by Plato and Aristotle, the author argues that we cannot understand the thought of the philosophers without also investigating its relation to the literary works; and that the literary works, in virtue of their form as well as their content, make a distinctive contribution to ethical thought.

The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia (HPC Classics)

Epicurus, Brad Inwood

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A total philosophy of life, death, religion, science, ethics, and culture promising liberation from the obstacles that stand in the way of our happiness, the teachings of Epicurus claimed many thousand committed followers all over the ancient Mediterranean world and deeply influenced later European thought. From the first years of its development, however, Epicureanism faced hostile opposition, and, as a result, much of our evidence for the content of this teaching is unhelpful and even misleading. "The Epicurus Reader" fills the need for a reliable selection and translation of the main surviving evidence, some of it never previously translated into English.Included here, with the exception of "Lucretius De Rerum Natura", are the most important surviving ancient texts of a system of thought that even today remains a powerful living philosophy. "The Epicurus Reader" will be greatly welcomed by anybody who teaches Hellenistic Philosophy, or Epicureanism in particular, at any level. It offers a judicious and ample selection of texts, including the only extant writings by Epicurus. More importantly it provides a reliable, often admirably accurate translation of these sometimes difficult texts. Finally, there is an introduction the general reader or the undergraduate will find very helpful.

Timaeus and Critias (Oxford World's Classics)

Plato, Andrew Gregory

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

'The god wanted everything to be good, marred by as little imperfection as possible.'

Timaeus, one of Plato's acknowledged masterpieces, is an attempt to construct the universe and explain its contents by means of as few axioms as possible. The result is a brilliant, bizarre, and surreal cosmos - the product of the rational thinking of a creator god and his astral assistants, and of purely mechanistic causes based on the behaviour of the four elements. At times dazzlingly clear, at times intriguingly opaque, this was state-of-the-art science in the middle of the fourth century BC. The world is presented as a battlefield of forces that are unified only by the will of God, who had to do the best he could with recalcitrant building materials.
The unfinished companion piece, Critias, is the foundational text for the story of Atlantis. It tells how a model society became corrupt, and how a lost race of Athenians defeated the aggression of the invading Atlanteans. This new edition combines the clearest translation yet of these crucial ancient texts with an illuminating introduction and diagrams.

The Consolation of Philosophy (Oxford World's Classics)

Boethius

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Editorial Review:

Boethius composed De Consolation Philosophiae in the sixth century A.D. while awaiting death by torture, condemned on a charge of plotting against Gothic rule, which he protested as manifestly unjust. Though a Christian, Boethius details the true end of life as the soul's knowledge of God, and consoles himself with the tenets of Greek philosophy, not with Christian precepts. Written in a form called Meippean Satire that alternates between prose and verse, Boethius' work often consists of a story told by Ovid or Horace to illustrate the philosophy being expounded. The Consolation of Philosophy dominated the intellectual world of the Middle Ages; it inspired writers as diverse Thomas Aquinas, Jean de Meun, and Dante. In England it was rendered into Old English by Alfred the Great, into Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer, and later Queen Elizabeth I made her own translation. The circumstances of composition, the heroic demeanor of the author, and the Meippean texture of part prose, part verse have been a fascination for students of philosophy, literature, and religion ever since.

El arte de la guerra/ The Art of War

Sun-tzu

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Para los que viven en guerra 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

a pesar de que este libro tenga milemios de antiguedad su palabra es aun vigente, y valida para aquellas personas que viven una guerra constante, asi sea en sus trabajos o en sus vidas y estan tan acostumbrada a ellas que no las pueden dejar. Las palabras del libro son sabias para aquellas personas que no les gusta perder y siempre tienen una meta fija.

Para ganar una guerra hay que conocer a tu enemigo y conocer sus defectos. Y como dice Sun Tzu "la mejor guerra es la que se gana sin pelar"

Lecciones vitales 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

El texto contiene la versión original de las reglas que el general Sun-Tzu escribió hace mas de dos mil años.

Contiene una versión comentada de todas las reglas que facilita su lectura, lo cual facilita mucho su lectura y comprensión al explicar el contexto en el que fueron escritas

El reducido tamaño de bolsillo lo hace ideal para una lectura rápida

Sin embargo, quizás es demasiado generalista; se echa de menos un análisis mas profundo que permita sacas mas conclusiones al lector

Editorial Review:

La versión de Thomas Cleary, de El Arte de la Guerra, libro de ds mil años de antiguedad, saca a la luz uno de los mas importantes textos clásicos chinos. En el que, a pesar del tiempo transcurrido, ninguna de sus máximas ha quedado anticuada.

The Essential Epicurus: Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, and Fragments (Great Books in Philosophy)

Epicurus

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The Greek Buddha 5 out of 5 stars.
70 of 71 people found this review helpful.

Epicurus lived in the Athens of Plato. He attracted a host of followers to his preferred teaching place, a garden. There he taught them the ultimately anti-Platonic truths: this life is the only one, it is good, and the best way to live it is by maximizing stable pleasures.

Few philosophers have been more maligned and underappreciated. The Platonists and their ilk (the later Christians) found Epicurus' teachings too much focused on this world and not enough on the other. They thought he taught unalloyed hedonism and accused the Epicureans of wild orgies. Today, an Epicurean is thought of as an effete, wine-sipping decadent. All of these conceptions are completely wrong.

Starting with the truth that everything is made from the material of atoms (after Democritus), Epicurus determined that our consciousness must necessarily die with the death of our bodies. Since this is the only life it should be the sole focus of our efforts. In this mortal life we must maximize our pleasure and minimize our pain. Pleasure is defined as the avoidance of pain and the stabilization of comfort. The most reliable comforts are certainly not sex, drugs, rock and roll-all such things are unstable pleasures that lead to greater appetites. The best pleasures are those that can be controlled without much effort such as good friendship, good cheer, and an appreciation for the simple things. By avoiding epicurean dishes (our misreading) and satisfying our appetites with the most basic, most easily attainable foods, we sate our hunger. The full belly wants neither caviar nor black bread. Taking this principle to all other pleasures, Epicurus finds them easily satisfied.

Much of our turmoil is due to immaterial concerns, the attainment of more power, money, love, and the evasion of death. Epicurus shows, point-by-point, how these concerns can be wrestled into submission. Once the basic pleasures are met and one's anxieties are minimized life becomes simple and good. Before Christianity put non-Chrisitians under the sword, Epicureanism had become immensely popular and was constantly growing. It is time it resumed its natural course.

O'Connor's translations personify the philosopher himself-they are clear and elegant. This is an insightful, exciting, and pleasant read.

Editorial Review:

Epicureanism is commonly regarded as the refined satisfaction of physical desires. As a philosophy, however, it also denoted the striving after an independent state of mind and body, imperturbability, and reliance on sensory data as the true basis of knowledge. Epicurus (ca. 341-271 B.C.) founded one of the most famous and influential philosophical schools of antiquity. In these remains of his vast output of scientific and ethical writings, we can trace Epicurus' views on atomism, physical sensation, duty, morality, the soul, and the nature of the gods.