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James Lesher, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield, editors. Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception. Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2006. Pp. xi + 446. Paper, $29.95.
Plato's Symposium has been a fertile source of philosophical, literary, and artistic inspiration for more than two thousand years. It continues to inspire debates amid the changing fashions in contemporary Plato interpretation. This volume of papers, which grew out of a conference at the Center for Hellenic Studies in 2005, is divided into four parts. Most of the papers are richly rewarding, but there is space here to do little more than hint at their main points.
Part I, "The Symposium and Plato's Philosophy," has three chapters. Christopher Rowe ("The Symposium as a Socratic Dialogue") implicitly challenges the old consensus about the Symposium as a "middle" dialogue, arguing that it is "early" or "Socratic" in its moral psychology, in part because he doubts that Forms (whose presence have supported the idea that the dialogue is "middle") are very important to the "Socratic-Platonic project" (18). He provocatively-and, I think, correctly-suggests that Forms were imposed on Plato as his signature view by Aristotle. In "The Role of the Earlier Speeches in the Symposium," Frisbee Sheffield argues that the earlier speeches serve as Aristotelian endoxa, stating claims that are reasonable and "disputes worth solving," as Socrates in fact does. Lloyd Gerson's "Platonic Reading of Plato's Symposium" is elegant and substantive in its first (theoretical) section, but plainly Neoplatonic in its interpretation of...