Plato’s Charmides
The Charmides is a difficult and enigmatic dialogue traditionally considered one of Plato’s Socratic dialogues. This book provides a close text commentary on the dialogue which tracks particular motifs throughout. These notably include the characterisation of Critias, Charmides, and Socrates; the historical context and subtext; literary features such as irony and foreshadowing; the philosophical context, especially how the dialogue looks back to more traditional Socratic dialogues and forward to dialogues traditionally placed in Plato’s middle and late period; and, most importantly, the philosophical and logical details of the arguments and their dialectical function. A new translation of the dialogue is included in an Appendix. This will be essential reading for all scholars and students of Plato and of ancient philosophy. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Voula Tsouna is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her other books include Philodemus: On Choices and Avoidances (1995), a critical edition and commentary on one of the Herculaneum papyri on Epicurean ethics, which received the Theodor Mommsen Award; The Epistemology of the Cyrenaic School (1998), recently translated into modern Greek (2019); The Ethics of Philodemus (2007); and a collection of essays on the Socratics and the Hellenistic schools (2012). She is currently preparing a monograph on the Republic Books 8 and 9 and another on The Normativity of Nature in Hellenistic Philosophy, to appear in the series Cambridge Elements in Ancient Philosophy, edited by James Warren.
Open access