Books for Prep | |
 - a must-have Highly recommended for any reader or thinker. The complete work of Plato, with helpful footnotes on translations and culture. Easy to navigate through, considering the size, and the margins leave enough space for highlighed scribbles and your own notes. Great price for even greater product, one that you will surely refrence multiple times. Rating:  - This is the business! This is the edition of Plato that you would have as required reading on an English medium Greek philosophy course. All the texts are translated and annotated by the relevant experts. In an ideal world you would have some kind of interlinear translation provided from the original Greek on the page facing the Greek translation, rather like the Interlinear New Testament as well as the translation into English prose. But then it would be incredibly expensive and very big I suppose. Anyway if you like Plato, this is the one! Though it is very large. If you were interested in a particular text, e.g. The Republic, and were planning to read it on the train, you might be better off with buying the Penguin or Wordsworth el cheapo editions that you can carry around with you. This one is quite big. Rating:  - CD-ROM not the Cooper & Hutchinson editionNote that the CD-ROM linked to this edition does not reflect the Cooper & Hutchinson selections and notes, but is comprised of pdf files of the Jowett translations. Rating: - Recommended, but use with careIf you are at all inclined to get all of Plato in one volume then you are well advised to get this volume, for lack of viable alternatives. The translations are a mixed bag. Cooper had little choice except to take over Grube's translations which inaugurated Hackett editions of Plato. While Grube delivers idiomatic English, he's inaccurate on so many key points that he will simply lead you into dead corners. (Instructurs should seriously avoid him in classroom use. There are worthwhile Penguin volumes of "Euthyphro" and "Republic".) That said, there are real gems in this collection: Burnyeat's "Theaetetus", Frede's "Philebus", Gill's "Parmenides", Zeyl's "Timaeus", Reeve's "Cratylus", Rowe's "Stateman". But if you are a real fan of (any of) those, you should seriously consider getting the individual volumes (also by Hackett) with their substantial introductions (all of them highly recommended) woefully if understandably omitted from this volume. (Why can't there by a Norton Plato? 3000 pages with all of the individual Hackett's... I know, the market.) Apart from this alternative (or complementation), you should also consider getting or borrowing items of the Clarendon Plato series: Gallop's "Phaedo", McDowell's "Theaetetus", Irwin's "Gorgias", and Taylor's "Protagoras" - philosophical commentaries and translations which have no superior (not so happy on Gallop, but you'll have to avoid Grube's "Phaedo" anyway). A final comment. If you are new to Plato, Cooper's volume can be a pleasure to start with. Begin with the first "Alcibiades" and the "Symposium" (both beautifully translated here) and then read Cooper's wonderful introduction to the volume. I very much doubt you'll ever live life without Plato afterwards. Rating: - This is itThis is the edition I used in college. It is the most thorough reference on Plato that I think exists and helped me get through a number of courses. Plus for all who are interested in philosophy it is an excellent introduction without being intimidating. I highly recommend this version to all. In association with Amazon.com | |