/lit/ - Literature

>>8752921
Glad I could help!

>>8753492
Would very strongly recommend the bloomsbury companion to Plato:

https://smile.amazon.com/Bloomsbury-Companion-Plato-Companions/dp/1474250912/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=

Whereas Copleston is a single writer maintaining a single narrative (while addressing various parts of Plato's life and work), the Bloomsbury companion is 300 pages of very brief essays--about 2 pages on average, with about 150 different essays that touch on an extremely broad assortment of areas of study about Plato as a man, the structures of his dialogues, the topics of the dialogues, and, finally, how he's been studied from his own time up to the 20th century.

It will be "shallow" in the sense that none of the essays are very long, but for studying Plato specifically I would recommend it above all else, as it introduces you to the vocabulary that is used in studying Plato (which is not necessarily the vocabulary of Plato himself) and gives you tons of new angles of approach, so you can see the nuances of the dialogues, and understand what it looks like when professional academics study him. It's "shallowness" makes it an insanely good initial secondary source for Plato. Even Copleston uses a lot of vocabulary, and references ideas, which will be totally unfamiliar to you even if you're read all of Plato but haven't read academic criticism of him.

Also Bloomsbury is one of only two books I know of (the other being AE Taylor's "Plato: The man and his work") which give overviews of every dialogue, peeking into their context in the corpus, the subjects they delve into, their significance to the overall corpus, etc. Most other secondary sources will have essays focusing on a single dialogue, or a single topic as addressed through various dialogues.

If you want to go deeper, check out the cambridge companion to Plato, and the cambridge companion to the Republic. The essays vary in quality and how interesting they are, but basically all of them have some value. They're also longer (20-40 pages per essay), so they offer a very different dimension of study from the very brief Bloomsbury and the very broad Copleston.

Also I haven't read these yet, so can't totally vouch for them, but have heard enough good things about Vlastos' 1973 "Platonic Studies" and Taylor's "Plato the man and his work" that I bought (but haven't yet read) both of them. Vlastos is apparently one of the 20th century's top Platonic scholars; Taylor gets referenced fairly frequently in the secondary sources I've read so far, and got a generous nod from Copleston (see note in bottom right of pic).

>>8753893
You might like Waterfield's "First Philosophers." It's not as comprehensive as the Graham book, but is a great intro. Would recommend reading Waterfield before Plato, Graham after Plato to revisit the ideas.

PS: Besides the Taylor book, anything I've mentioned above I can give you guys as ebooks if you're interested. Just let me know.

Hope this helps!

>>8725468
> I know that people say that that order is bull

These people are retards. There is undeniably still no EXACT placement for almost any of the dialogues, but there is still a vague "norm" that is accepted, at least in broad strokes: individual dialogues may not be placed exactly, but clusters can be and have been recognized and placed pretty consistently through numerous stylometric studies using varying criteria over like 150 years.

Pic related is Copleston's division of the works. The title of Part I (listed on the previous page) is "The Socratic Period: In this period Plato is still influenced by the Socratic intellectual determinism. Most of the dialogues end without any definite result having been attained. This is characteristic of Socrates' "not knowing.""

IMO the best thing to do if you're not being guided by a pro is to just read in whatever order you like (I followed Cooper's complete Plato from start to finish) and then touch base with some secondary texts on Plato to see how the dialogues are thought to cluster chronologically and thematically (these will often be very different groupings).

I enjoyed the hell out of the bloomsbury companion to Plato, which is about 100 very short essays (the book is 300 pages total) on the basics of Plato the man, his dialogues, his topics, and study of Plato from his contemporaries to the 20th century. Would definitely recommend that.

Also the cambridge companion to Plato has an entire essay on stylometry and its conclusions about Plato. The essay is not very good and is almost insanely boring (I thought), but you may want to check it out. The gist is that most stylometry at least generally reinforces the "early, transitional, middle, late" divisions. The rest of the companion is great, though, and I think would help at least showing you how dialogues are interconnected thematically, e.g., the essay on pleasure in Philebus argues that it draws and builds on conceptions of pleasure in Phaedo, Protagoras, and Republic to culminate in the one presented in Philebus.

Also Copleston, the Bloomsbury Companion, and the introduction to Cooper's complete Plato have comments on the corpus of Plato; you may want to check out some of those remarks, as they touch on suggested reading order, chronological vs thematic, etc.