Lexington Books
Pages: 364
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-4985-0176-7 • Hardback • October 2015 • $143.00 • (£110.00)
978-1-4985-0178-1 • Paperback • July 2017 • $60.99 • (£47.00)
978-1-4985-0177-4 • eBook • October 2015 • $57.50 • (£44.00)
David Levine was a tutor at St. John's College, Santa Fe, for twenty-seven years.
Chapter One: Remembering the Tyrant in the Age of Totalitarianism: A General Introduction
Chapter Two: The City and Its Promise (153a1-155a8)
Chapter Three: Doctor Socrates (155a8-158c4)
Chapter Four: The Look Beneath, Part One: The Dilemma of Our Sociability (155c5-160d4)
Chapter Five: The Look Beneath, Part II: The Elusiveness of Selfhood (160d5-162b11)
Chapter Six: The Wisdom of Critias (162c1-166c5)
Chapter Seven: The Lesson of Ignorance, I (166c6-167a8)
Chapter Eight: The Lesson of Ignorance, II (167a9-169d8)
Chapter Nine: Horn or Ivory, The Two Faces of Sophrosyne (169d9-175d3)
Chapter Ten: “A Sight Surely Worth Seeing” (175d4-176d5)
Appendix: Synopsis
[The book] is a thoughtful treatment of the dialogue from a particular perspective, and worth reading on that account.
— Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Plato’s Charmides is not one of the more famous dialogues or one often thought of as central. . . .The latter fact is probably irremediable; the former opinion is now, once and for all, remedied by Profound Ignorance. . . .[T]he Charmides is of all the Platonic dialogues the one that most immediately bears on our own contemporary political condition, the one that most directly illuminates the root problems of modernity. . . .Profound Ignorance: Plato’s Charmides and the Saving of Wisdom is a book that shows what a Platonic dialogue is and what a reading of it can be.
— The St. John's Review
This is a major work of our time on Plato, a scholar's achievement worthy of a lifetime.
— Harvey Mansfield, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution