Socrates. Observe, Protarchus, the nature of the position which you are now going to take from Philebus, and what the other position is which I maintain, and which, if you do not approve of it, is to be controverted by you. Shall you and I sum up the two sides? Protarchus. By all means. Soc. Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure for all who are able to partake of them, and that to all such who are or ever will be they are the most advantageous of all things. Have I not given, Philebus, a fair statement of the two sides of the argument?

The Philebus is an extraordinarily creative and profound examination of what makes for a good human life, containing some of Plato's most sophisticated discussions of moral psychology, knowledge, metaphysics, and philosophical methodology. The Philebushad a far greater influence on Aristotle's ethics than the frequently studied Republic - yet historians of philosophical ethics have relatively neglected it and existing commentaries tend to emphasize certain aspects at the expense of others. This edited volume, the first of its kind, brings together leading scholars of ancient philosophy to take a fresh and comprehensive look at this important work. Each essay focuses on a relatively brief section of the Philebus and discusses the passages methodically, covering topics such as pleasure, knowledge, philosophical method, and the human good in detail. The result is not and is not intended to be a commentary, nor does it aim to present a unified interpretation. It is instead a series of close, original philosophical examinations, often in conversation with each other, which together provide continuous coverage of the Philebus. This reference work, a useful resource for teaching and studying, is valuable reading for researchers, scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in Plato, ancient Greek ethics, and in the history of ethics.

With The Tragedy and Comedy of Life, Seth Benardete completes his examination of Plato's understanding of the beautiful, the just, and the good. Benardete first treated the beautiful in The Being of the Beautiful (1984), which dealt with the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman; and he treated the just in Socrates Second Sailing (1989), which dealt with the Republic and sought to determine the just in its relation to the beautiful and the good. Benardete focuses in this volume on the good as discussed in the Philebus, which is widely regarded as one of Plato's most complex dialogues. Traditionally, the Philebus is interpreted as affirming the supposedly Platonic doctrine that the good resides in thought and mind rather than in pleasure or the body. Benardete challenges this view, arguing that Socrates vindicates the life of the mind over against the life of pleasure not by separating the two and advocating a strict asceticism, but by mixing pleasure and pain with mind in such a way that the philosophic life emerges as the only possible human life. Socrates accomplishes this by making use of two principles - the limited and the unlimited - and shows that the very possibility of philosophy requires not just the limited but also the unlimited, for the unlimited permeates the entirety of life as well as the endless perplexity of thinking itself. Benardete combines a probing and challenging commentary that subtly mirrors and illumines the complexities of this extraordinarily difficult dialogue with the finest English translation of the Philebus yet available. The result is a work that will be of great value to classicists, philosophers, and political theorists alike.

Written in the fourth century BCE, Philebus is likely one of Plato’s last Socratic dialogues. It is also famously difficult to read and understand. A multilayered inquiry into the nature of life, Philebus has drawn renewed interest from scholars in recent years. Yet, until now, the only English-language commentary available has been a work published in 1897. This much-needed new commentary, designed especially for philosophers and advanced students of ancient Greek, draws on up-to-date scholarship to expand our understanding of Plato’s complex work. In his in-depth introduction, George Rudebusch places the Philebus in historical, philosophical, and linguistic context. As he explains, the dialogue deals with the question of whether a good life consists of pleasure or knowing. Yet its exploration of this question is riddled with ambiguity. With the goal of facilitating comprehension, particularly for students of philosophy, Rudebusch divides his commentary into twenty discrete subarguments. Within this framework, he elucidates the significance—and possible interpretations—of each passage and dissects their philological details. In particular, he analyzes how Plato uses inference indicators (that is, the Greek words for “therefore” and “because”) to establish the structure of the arguments, markers difficult to present in translation. A detailed and thorough commentary, this volume is both easy to navigate and conducive to new interpretations of one of Plato’s most intriguing dialogues.

A translation of Plato's dialogue on the nature of pleasure and its relation to thought and knowledge. It includes a cogent introduction, notes, and comprehensive bibliography.

For readers with a very basic grasp of Ancient Greek who want a better understanding of the text than translations provide, this book provides on the same page with lines of Greek text a grammatical commentary and a vocabulary of infrequent words. A complete vocabulary and unglossed verb paradigms are in the back, making this text an all-inclusive resource for individual study or use in a lower-level Greek course.

The Philebus is hard to reconcile with standard interpretations of Plato’s philosophy and in this pioneering work Donald Davidson, seeks to take the Philebus at face value and to reassess Plato’s late philosophy in the light of the results. The author maintains that the approach to ethics in the Philebus represents a considerable return to the methodology of the earlier dialogues. He emphasizes Plato’s reversion to the Socratic elenchus and connects it with the startling reappearance of Socrates as the leading voice in the Philebus.