Lecons Platoniciennes

The dialogs of Plato can read like anthentic police inquiries. Someone (often Socrates) is trying to identify the foundation of a problem in order to extract from it the basis for an ontology, ethic or policy. But the interviewers of Socrates - or, in later dialogs, of the Stranger in Sophist - express their interrogations in the concrete context of their opinion about things in general, the world, and their daily activities. Thus the work evokes, in turn, the occupations of a poet, navigator, craftsman, and politician, as well as the issue of language, the exercise of power, justice, such as what controls the existence of the cosmos, beauty, truth - all of which transpire on the corner of an Athens street.In this immense work, which has inspired more than two thousand years of unceasing commentary, the neophyte, like the scholar seeking to decipher its structure, will have to meander among all those dialog voices, separating water from wine, observing how Socrates seizes upon a word from which he develops a genuine dialectic - the precisely correct form for posing questions.This work by Alexis Philonenko offers detailed analysis of each dialog (except for the " youth " dialogs) ; he reveals what is at stake, the reversals, and the vital lead that is woven into the text. These lessons constitute a unique tool for students and " experts " alike, enabling them to participate in the practice of platonian dialog in order to more effectively identify their complex relationships, and to profit from what this philosophy offers of unfathomable value, which has remained the foundation of thought in the Western World.Alexis Philonenko, Professor Emeritus of the Université de Rouen, is an outstanding translator (predominantly of Kant). He has written many books considered as reference works in contemporary French philosophy circles, specifically his writings on Schopenhauer, Kant, Fichte and Feuerbach, as well as his three-volume book Rousseau. Surprisingly, he also wrote the remarkable work, Histoire de la boxe (1991).