/lit/ - Literature

>>10482443
And here's the image inside the image (woah).

>>9757240
Forgot Copleston pic

Plato lit I would recommend:

-Copleston's "history of philosophy." Section on Plato is maybe 150 pages. Gives you broad strokes of P's major philosophical developments. Not too in depth, not comprehensive, but very readable and helpful. Great start to your commentaries.
-"Bloomsbury companion to Plato": Probably the single best, modern overview of Platonic scholarship, period. 50 pages of bio/historical background on the pre-socratics, Socrates, Plato, and Greece; I think 150 pages of summaries and quick commentaries on each dialogue; 50 pages on P's methods and tools he uses in the dialogues (e.g., Socratic irony); 50 pages on the history of Platonic scholarship from Plato to the 20th C. It's a total of like 200 very short (~1-2 pages) essays from as many different scholars. Introduces you to a lot of high brow stuff you can dig into if you want to do so later.

-AE Taylor, "Plato: the man and his work": Only book-length treatment of all of Plato, dialogue by dialogue. A bit dated, but perfect for the casual reader. Is built on and referenced often by more modern commentaries.

-Cambridge companions to (1) Plato, (2) Plato's Republic. Selections of essays of varying length, quality, difficulty. Most are good, some are great. Read them all. They're far more specific than anything mentioned above, so read these last.

There are a few others but they're not as good, as major, or as approachable. Read the above and you'll have a great grasp of what's up, and can take any further steps on your own, if you feel up to it.

Aristotle is harder and less fun to read about. At least when you start (i.e., organon, physics), I'd recommend reading as much secondary lit as possible, but my favorites so far (gonna give you one for each text I've read so far) are:

-Kenneth Telford's commentary on categories/de int. Read this ASAP to figure out wtf is going on. You will be totally lost without it. (secondary recommendation: clarendon aristotle series (oxford press) commentary on the same two texts)

-Notes in the Hackett edition of prior analytics (secondary rec: clarendon series notes on book 1 of this)

-Aquinas' commentary on posterior analytics (secondary: clarendon series)

-Aquinas' commentary on Physics (secondary: oxford classics intro; tons of commentaries on Physics are too advanced for a new reader)

-Loeb edition of De Caelo for chapter notes, diagrams (minor text; not many commentaries)

-Clarendon series edition of/commentary on de generatione et corruptione (minimal lit exists for this treatise; loeb edition will have notes)

-Malcom Wilson's "structure and method of Aristotle's meteorologica"

I just finished de anima so I can't rec anything further. In general: Always try to find an aquinas commentary (dumb ox book editions) and read it before anything else; loeb will always have notes, but they're expensive; clarendon is expensive and very hard to read, but for minor works you often don't have a choice.

Cheers!