Description
Book SynopsisReturning from the battle of Potidaea, Socrates reenters the city only to find it changed, with new leadership in the making. Socrates assumes the mask of physician in order to diagnose the city's condition in the persons of the young and charismatic Charmides and his ambitious and formidable guardian Critias. Beneath the cloak of their self-presentations, Doctor Socrates discovers a profound and communicable disease: their incipient tyranny, the greatest sickness of the soul. He thereby is able to foresee their future and their role in the oligarchy (The Thirty Tyrants) that overthrows the democracy at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The unusual diagnostic instrument of this physician of the city: the question of sophrosyne (customarily translated as moderation). The analysis of the soul of this popular favorite uncovers a distorted development with little prospect of self-knowledge, and that of the guardian, a profound disabling ignorance, deluded and perverted by his presumed prac
Trade Review[The book] is a thoughtful treatment of the dialogue from a particular perspective, and worth reading on that account. * Notre Dame Magazine *
Plato’s Charmides is not one of the more famous dialogues or one often thought of as central. . . .The latter fact is probably irremediable; the former opinion is now, once and for all, remedied by Profound Ignorance. . . .[T]he Charmides is of all the Platonic dialogues the one that most immediately bears on our own contemporary political condition, the one that most directly illuminates the root problems of modernity. . . .Profound Ignorance: Plato’s Charmides and the Saving of Wisdom is a book that shows what a Platonic dialogue is and what a reading of it can be. * The St. John's Review *
This is a major work of our time on Plato, a scholar's achievement worthy of a lifetime. -- Harvey Mansfield, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
Table of ContentsChapter One: Remembering the Tyrant in the Age of Totalitarianism: A General Introduction Chapter Two: The City and Its Promise (153a1-155a8) Chapter Three: Doctor Socrates (155a8-158c4) Chapter Four: The Look Beneath, Part One: The Dilemma of Our Sociability (155c5-160d4) Chapter Five: The Look Beneath, Part II: The Elusiveness of Selfhood (160d5-162b11) Chapter Six: The Wisdom of Critias (162c1-166c5) Chapter Seven: The Lesson of Ignorance, I (166c6-167a8) Chapter Eight: The Lesson of Ignorance, II (167a9-169d8) Chapter Nine: Horn or Ivory, The Two Faces of Sophrosyne (169d9-175d3) Chapter Ten: “A Sight Surely Worth Seeing” (175d4-176d5) Appendix: Synopsis
