Socrates on Friendship and Community
Reflections on Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus,andLysis

Mary P. Nichols addresses Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's criticism of Socrates and recovers the place of friendship and community in Socratic philosophizing.

Mary P. Nichols (Author)

9780521899734, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 24 November 2008

238 pages
23.4 x 15.7 x 1.9 cm, 0.44 kg

'Socrates on Friendship and Community will be of considerable interests to classicists, philosophers, and political theorists alike. It focuses its reflections on three Platonic dialogues, but in so doing contributes much to the appreciation of the suggestive art of Platonic composition generally.' Hermathena

In Socrates on Friendship and Community, Mary P. Nichols addresses Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's criticism of Socrates and recovers the place of friendship and community in Socratic philosophizing. This approach stands in contrast to the modern philosophical tradition, in which Plato's Socrates has been viewed as an alienating influence on Western thought and life. Nichols' rich analysis of both dramatic details and philosophic themes in Plato's Symposium, Phaedras, and Lysis shows how love finds its fulfilment in the reciprocal relation of friends. Nichols also shows how friends experience another as their own and themselves as belonging to another. Their experience, she argues, both sheds light on the nature of philosophy and serves as a standard for a political life that does justice to human freedom and community.

1. The problem of Socrates: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
2. Love, generation, and political community (the Symposium)
3. Self-knowledge, love, and rhetoric (Plato's Phaedrus)
4. Who is the friend? (the Lysis)
5. Socratic philosophizing.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500 [HPCA], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA]