Plato's Dialogues One by One interprets and contextualizes each of Plato's dialogues. Victorino Tejera analyzes and explains the content and intellectual quality of the dialogues, highlighting their dramatic aliveness and historico-political allusiveness. He treats each dialogue according to its own integrity, not imposing any system outside of their individual composition, and with an even-handedness that does not place too much emphasis on any aspect or neglect any included concept. With this approach, Tejera seeks to free Plato from the constraints constructed (...) by Academia and to treat him as the open-minded intellectual son of Socrates, releasing the free-flying swan that in the myth became the home of the soul of the master. (shrink)

This volume illuminates the achievements of present-day social science insights. It merits a close reading by those for whom the history of ideas is a living entity.

Tejera examines how Platonism--a philosophy imported from outside Plato's dialogues--changed our understanding of the dialogues.

Written in the American tradition, American Modern: The Path Not Taken describes how four major American thinkers practiced philosophy non-reductively by incorporating the arts and other human activities. Tejera provides a detailed analysis of Peirce, Dewey, Santayana, and Buchler, showing that the importance they placed on the human can cure what is missing in recent philosophy. American Modern will interest philosophers, historians of philosophy, and scholars of American intellectual history.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews Bibliography on Plato's "'Laws, "" 1920-1970: With Additional Citations through May, 1975. By Trevor J. Saunders. (New York: Arno Press, 1976. Pp. i + 60. $15.00) The Penguin Classics translator of the non-Socratic Laws, as Leo Strauss called them, has here compiled in a most usable way a thorough bibliography of books and articles about the Laws or parts of them. The section "Texts, Translations, and Commentaries" (...) properly excludes translations not made directly from the Greek. In previous centuries this would, also properly, have excluded many a famous or popular translation, such as Thomas Taylor's or Victor Cousin's, worked out from the text of M. Ficino's "first edition" in Latin. Given the state of the Greek text and the practice, inaugurated by Ficino, of improving upon the Greek in the translatioias, some notation about the literalness of the translations cited would have been of additional value. Section B, in thirty pages, is the largest and also deliberately the most selective in striving to limit itself to work concerned exclusively or primarily with the Laws. But it cannot avoid including much material about some aspect of Plato in general rather than about the Laws; this is especially true of the subsection, B1, on comprehensive accounts. Section B2, on the text and its tradition, has overwhelmingly more citations about the indirect tradition than about the texts themselves, an interesting indication of the current state of this question. The next subsections, to B12, divide according to subject matter. BI3 lists studies on the influence of the Laws. The last section, in twenty-four pages, is most valuable. It lists, by Stephanus page number, an abundance of discussions of individual passages from Book I through Book XII wherever these discussions, bibliographically speaking, may have occurred. Students of the Laws will be well served by, and most grateful to, Professor Saunders for this bibliography. I can only second the intent of his parting epigraph that sends us back to the study of the Laws themselves. But I must add that more explicitly detailed work appears to be required both on the difficulties the text itself presents to students of Plato (one thinks of A. Boeckh's analyses of the prose in Books I through III) and on those which arise when the Laws is contrasted--from the point of view of design and intellectuality--with those of Plato's works that are comparable, if not in number of pages, at least in scale of conception and monumentality. V. TEJERA SUNY at Stony Brook Science and Philosophy in Aristotle's Biological Works. By Anthony Preus. (Hildesheim and New York: George Olms, 1975. Pp. ix + 404. DM.88) A reciprocal influence between Aristotle's philosophy and biology--if it could be demonstrated through step-by-step criticism and not merely asserted in generalities about functionalism--might help to explain both, and might also itself be philosophically interesting ; for it should clarify Aristotle's concepts of form, essence, universal, and species-concepts which have been mercilessly jumbled in the traditional interpretations. With the failure of Jaegerian developmental analyses, we can hardly now hope for help from detailed chronology. But a general dating of Aristotle's biological interest to the Assos-Mytilene period, when he was already aged forty, is accepted by most people (though not by Jaeger who [463]... (shrink)

Both Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Sextus Empiricus say that Diels fragment 1 of Herakleitos comes from the beginning of “his writing” ; and this word is often translated as “his book,” on the assumption that a piece of writing must be a book. And they quote it without the adversative particle de as its second word. Thus the Rhetoric.

First published in 1984, this revised edition is designed to meet the needs of students and teachers of classical political philosophy. The two chief differences between the present revised edition and the first are the addition of a section on Solon's ethics in Chapter II, and the more frontal approach taken to the discourse of the visitor from Elea in Plato's Politicusóan approach which allows the reader to capture better and trace more easily his systematic equivocation between "the political man" (...) and "the kingly man." Contents: On the Nature of Reflective Discourse in Politics; Solon's Political Judgement and his Poetry; Thucydides's Reflective Discourse and Politics; The Politics of a Sophistic Rhetorician: Applied Pythagorism Scrutinized; Plato's "Republic" or the Remedial Constitution; Aristotle's Political Philosophy; Dante and the Recovery of City-State Rationality about Politics; On the Unity of Machiavelli "The Prince" with the "Discourses"; Biography; Index. (shrink)

Victorino Tejera combines an American naturalist approach to Aristotle's modes of knowing with new applications of Justus Buchler's systematic metaphysics. Bridging the gap between classical and modern, Tejera reveals a cohesive revitalization of metaphysical naturalism for contemporary scholars.

Contents: Introduction: on the Intellectual History of Democratic Athens. A Modern Defense of Xenophon's Oligarchic Socrates. The Prelude to the Timaeus and the Atlantis Story. On the Ambivalence and Ideology of the Aristotelian Politics. In Search of the Unplatonized, Prescholastic Aristotle. Philosophic Historiography and the Reception-History of Plato and Aristotle. References and Bibliography.