Description
Book SynopsisIn Plato's dialogues, an idealized Socrates expounds the ideas for which Plato will, until the end of history, be famous. The world of Forms: the ideal Republic with its totalitarian masterplan; the tribute to Eros, god of lover (or at least of homosexual love); the promise of the soul's salvation - all this has come down to us in the distinctive tone of voice of Plato's teacher. But how much of it did Socrates believe? Were Plato's contemporaries really taken in? And what lay behind his philosophy, from which the real world of men and women was so rigorously excluded? Until the discovery of the 'Xanthippic Inquiries' we had no answer to those questions. Now at last the real Plato is revealed to us, by the women whom he banished from his arguaments. In this brilliant and witty expose, the mask of abstraction is lifted, to reveal the truth that lies beneath. And the truth is Xanthippe: wife of Socrates, teacher of Aristotle, and Founding Mother of the Western World. This is a book that not feminist can afford to ignore.
Trade Review"A rioutous send-up of scholarly writing. If philosophy seems an unlikely subject for comedy, try this..." - 'Financial Times' "Prodigiously learned, exquisitely malicious, and relentlessly subversive of the 'bien pensant' pieties of our age. This is satire at its best." - 'Sunday Telegraph' "What is original is the working of it into a rich complex, compelling, fluent and natural-seeming fiction, in which each theme and topic seems spontaneously to arise out of its predecessor, and whole to woven together into a convincing vision, unified but not unitary, of the nature and ends of life." - Robert Grant, 'Philosophical Quarterly'
Table of Contentspreface, notes, index
