The Collected Dialogues of Plato

The Hamilton and Cairns one-volume Plato: every dialogue generally accepted as genuine, plus the letters, drawn from the best English translations of the preceding century and fitted with prefatory notes to each dialogue and a cross-referenced index that reconciles the different translators’ vocabularies. That last feature is the practical reason this edition survived — Plato’s key terms come out differently in Jowett than in a modern hand, and the index lets a reader follow one idea across translators.

Plato is where the argumentative form itself gets invented: not a treatise asserting conclusions but a conversation in which claims are tested to destruction. For a curriculum aimed at forming citizens, the Republic, the Gorgias and the Apology are the load-bearing texts — what justice is, whether rhetoric is a craft or a trick, and what a city does to the man who will not stop asking.

Context: Listed under Philosophy in the Ages 13-99+ band, Lexile 1240. Note the ISBN defect recorded above: the curator’s purchase link goes to a short reprint, not to this volume.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the curriculum this came from; the adult “Ages 13-99+” band is the part Kyle carded.
• Plato — the author.
• Plato: Complete Works — the Hackett complete works, the competing one-volume edition, already carded.
• Great Dialogues of Plato — the third one-volume Plato in the anti-library.
• Plato’s Republic, Apology of Socrates (Plato) and Theaetetus — individual dialogues already carded separately.
• Greek Philosophy — the tradition.
• Philosophy — the curator’s genre bucket.
• Classics — the wider corpus.
• Justice — the question the Republic opens with and never quite closes.