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Translator: Benjamin Jowett

Le Banquet se situe comme dialogue intermédiaire (entre les dialogues « socratiques » et les grands textes pédagogiques) non seulement dans sa forme, mais dans son contenu. De même que le Phédon, il indique qu'à côté de la formation proprement intellectuelle, il y a une initiation fondée sur des expériences privilégiées : le sentiment de la mort, le sentiment de l'amour. Ce que la philosophie montre alors, c'est qu'il faut savoir interpréter ce donné affectif ; Èros, fils de Pauvreté et d'Expédient, est, de la sorte, comme la réplique sensible du désir de Sagesse-Savoir : il est philosophe.

Editor: David Widger

Plato (428/427348/347 BCE) was a Greek philosopher and mathematician of the Classic Age who founded the Academy of Athens. Noted as a student of Socrates, Plato has distinguished himself as one of the founders of Western philosophy by recording the teachings of his master and his own philosophies in 35 dialogues and 13 letters (some are disputed as spurious). However, this collection features only 25 authentic works from the reproduced source.Benjamin Jowett is credited for translating these works into English.

What is justice? Is the life upheld by Socrates sufficiently definite for practical guidance? The views of Callicles have been overborne; but have they been thoroughly examined? Socrates claims to be the only politician. But how can that deserve the name of policy which results in doing nothing? These and cognate questions may well have haunted Plato when he planned the Republic, the greatest of his works. The great principle of the political supremacy of mind, though thus held back through half the dialogue, really dominates the whole. It may be read between the lines all through, even in the institution of gymnastic and the appraisement of the cardinal virtues. It is a genuine development of Socratic thought. And it is this more than any other single feature which gives the Republic a prophetic significance as an attempt towards anticipating the work of future generations.

Timaeus by Plato is one of Platos dialogues, mostly in the form of a long monologue given by the title character Timaeus of Locri, written c. 360 BC. The work puts forward speculation on the nature of the physical world and human beings and is followed by the dialogue Critias.Participants in the dialogue include Socrates, Timaeus, Hermocrates, and Critias. Some scholars believe that it is not the Critias of the Thirty Tyrants who appears in this dialogue, but his grandfather, who is also named Critias.It has been suggested from some traditions (Diogenes Laertius (VIII 85) from Hermippus of Smyrna (3rd century BC) and Timon of Phlius (c. 320 c. 235 BC)) that Timaeus was influenced by a book about Pythagoras, written by Philolaus, although this assertion is generally considered false.The dialogue takes place the day after Socrates described his ideal state. In Platos works, such a discussion occurs in the Republic. Socrates feels that his description of the ideal state wasnt sufficient for the purposes of entertainment and that "I would be glad to hear some account of it engaging in transactions with other states" (19b).

The Statesman by Plato also known by its Latin title, Politicus, is a Socratic dialogue written by Plato. The text depicts a conversation among Socrates, the mathematician Theodorus, another person named Socrates (referred to as "Socrates the Younger"), and an unnamed philosopher from Elea referred to as "the Stranger" (?, xenos). It is ostensibly an attempt to arrive at a definition of "statesman," as opposed to "sophist" or "philosopher" and is presented as following the action of the Sophist.The Sophist had begun with the question of whether the sophist, statesman, and philosopher were one or three, leading the Eleatic Stranger to argue that they were three but that this could only be ascertained through full accounts of each (Sophist 217b). But though Plato has his characters give accounts of the sophist and statesman in their respective dialogues, it is most likely that he never wrote a dialogue about the philosopher.

Parmenides is widely considered to be one of the more, if not the most, challenging and enigmatic of Platos dialogues. The work purports to be an account of a meeting between the two great philosophers of the Eleatic school, Parmenides and Zeno of Elea, and a young Socrates. The occasion of the meeting was the reading by Zeno of his treatise defending Parmenidean monism against those partisans of plurality who asserted that Parmenides supposition that there is a one gives rise to intolerable absurdities and contradictions.