Preface.

This book aims to reach all those who feel the need to gain a full understanding of what the name Plato has meant for humanity until now, and what it must continue to mean.

This is not to say that every memorable statement Plato ever made is set down in this book. Instead, it seeks to place the reader at the center of the Platonic world of thought. From there, the reader may learn to relate any more peripheral areas they encounter back to this center, and thus understand them fully in Plato’s own sense.

This center is, and will always remain, the theory of ideas. Many people today hold the opinion that this is not the most eternal, and perhaps even the most transient, part of Plato’s intellectual legacy. Even if we disregard those who see his literary form as everything and his subject matter as merely secondary, some may still find Plato’s ethical and sociopedagogical social-educational proposals more important and worthy of attention for our time than that which forms almost the exclusive subject of this presentation: dialectics. This limitation of our task may most require defense against those who do not wish to see this or that, but rather everything in everything, and who want to see Plato’s full personality placed before them like an impressive monument, rather than this book which provides only the subject matter, over and over again.

However, the understanding of a personality like Plato’s can only be gained from the subject matter itself, and only from its center. But the form—as one should have learned from Plato himself—is only to be grasped, and ultimately only has value, as the form of its content. If one wishes for antiquity to live for us, then the factual content of the

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Library stamp: ST. ALBERT’S COLLEGE LIBRARY