This classic one-volume edition of the complete writings of Plato is now available in paperback for the very first time. The editors, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, chose the contents from the work of the best modern British and American translators. The volume contains prefatory notes to each dialogue, by Hamilton; an introductory essay on Plato’s philosophy and writings, by Cairns; and a comprehensive index with cross references. In a new foreword, acclaimed philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein describes Plato’s unparalleled importance to philosophy down to the present day, why he chose the artful form of the dialogue, and what makes this edition of his writings special.
Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) was perhaps the most famous and influential classicist of the twentieth century. Her bestselling Mythology remains a standard version of the stories of the ancient world. Huntington Cairns (1904–1985) was a writer and lawyer who worked at different times for the U.S. Treasury, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and Johns Hopkins University. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist whose books include Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away and Thirty-Six Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.
"This elegant edition contains many of the best and most readable English translations of the Dialogues and Letters. . . . Judiciously edited."—Review of Metaphysics
“Superlative. . . . [The book’s] translations remain for me the Platonic Forms of the Platonic dialogues. They are the voice of Socrates and his interlocutors that I hear when I think about the questions which Plato so vividly dramatized for us two millennia ago. They are voices and questions which continue to resonate today.”—from the foreword by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
