Plato's Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life -- Plato

<p><b>In </b><b><i>Plato's "Letters"</i></b><b>, Ariel Helfer provides to readers, for the first time, a highly literal translation of the </b><b><i>Letters</i></b><b>, complete with extensive notes on historical context and issues of manuscript transmission.</b> His analysis presents a necessary perspective for readers who wish to study Plato's <i>Letters</i> as a work of Platonic philosophy. </p><p>Centuries of debate over the provenance and significance of Plato's <i>Letters</i> have led to the common view that the<i> Letters</i> is a motley collection of jewels and scraps from within and without Plato's literary estate. In a series of original essays, Helfer describes how the <i>Letters</i> was written as a single work, composed with a unity of purpose and a coherent teaching, marked throughout by Plato's artfulness and insight and intended to occupy an important place in the Platonic corpus. Viewed in this light, the Letters is like an unusual epistolary novel, a manner of semifictional and semiautobiographical literary-philosophic experiment, in which Plato sought to provide his most demanding readers with guidance in thinking more deeply about the meaning of his own career as a philosopher, writer, and political advisor.</p><p><i>Plato's "Letters"</i> not only defends what Helfer calls the "literary unity thesis" by reviewing the scholarly history pertaining to the Platonic letters but also brings out the political philosophic lessons revealed in the Letters. As a res