Great Dialogues of Plato

The standard one-volume selection of Plato’s dialogues, usually the W. H. D. Rouse translation, gathering the Republic entire with Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Ion, Meno and Symposium around it. The dialogues were written in Athens in the fourth century BC and put Socrates on stage as the questioner, mostly to dismantle confident positions rather than to replace them: what justice is and whether it pays, whether virtue can be taught, whether the soul survives, and how a city should be arranged if you take the answers seriously. The Republic supplies the images that Western argument has been quoting ever since — the cave, the ship of state, the philosopher-king — and the shorter dialogues supply Socrates himself, on trial and then dying, which is the part that made him a figure rather than a position.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s fifth section is a chronological walk through the history of Western civilisation by way of its primary texts — Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Freud, in that order. Starting at Plato is the whole design: he is reading the West as a single long argument and going to the source of it rather than to a survey.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the 137-entry Himalaya Capital bibliography, at the head of the section on History of Western Civilization. Kyle saved the list as two X posts that photographed only the value-investing section; this entry came out of the source PDF, which gives no year or publisher for it.

Connections

• Plato — the author.
• Socrates — the character through whom almost all of it is argued.
• Philosophy and Ethics — the dialogues are where both get their standing questions.
• Plato’s Republic — the longest dialogue in this volume, already in the anti-library on its own.
• Plato: Complete Works — the unabridged alternative already carded; this is the selected one-volume route.
• Li Lu · Himalaya Capital — the curator and the bibliography.