Dialogues on Plato - The Idea of the Good

New Images of Plato comprises the proceedings of an international colloquium held in Gaflei, Liechtenstein under the auspices of the International Plato Centre at the International Academy of Philosophy, and in collaboration with the International Plato Society. Twenty-seven Plato scholars, representing as diverse a range of approaches to Plato as possible, engaged in direct dialogue with each other, across their sometimes profound disagreements. In order to bring their differences into focus, the participants were asked to summarize their approaches to Plato and bring them to bear on one single text, a text whose centrality to Plato's thought goes by no means undisputed, but which is universally deemed worthy of discussion, if only because of the place it has held in Platonic studies: the Simile of the Sun in the Republic. The confrontations presented in this volume, in matters of method as in matters of interpretation, help to clarify the several methodologies through contrast and by putting them to test on a single, well-defined passage.