The best Plato books

A landmark philosophical tome, which argues for the ‘imbrication of forgetting in memory’. The disentangling of the complex relationships between history, memory and forgetting raises ethical questions about abuses of memory and interrogates the connection between forgetting and forgiving.

A wonderful retelling of the legend of Gelert the Wolfhound.

This story of bravery and loyalty, starring the world's largest dog breed, takes the reader on an adventure of tremendous magnitude. I fell in love with the illustrations, I laughed at the jokes. I adored the book. This is one you will keep in your library for rereading.

Professor Richer, author of a half-dozen books, commonly commented on intellectual matters for French radio. My recommendation of his only book translated into English requires an explanation because the book contains multiple errors and is seriously flawed. In places, Richer neglects the effects of the Precession and elsewhere uses maps on which unrelated points are forced to fall along straight lines. But I once spoke with Richer and have read his other books knowing that the man had a secret. Indeed, more than one. Richer had access to papyrus texts indicating that the Ancient Greeks had set out temples, cities, and colonies across the Mediterranean in ways that reflected the zodiac. Another reason for his secrecy, which I discuss in my own book, is that the papyruses, discovered during Bonaparte's Egyptian Campaign (1798-1801), also included materials that ultimately gave rise to The Da Vinci Code.

An inspirational exploration of profound contemplations on forgetting, which takes the reader on a guided tour through neglected passages in the writings of illustrious writers from antiquity to present times, including Homer, Ovid, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Locke, Voltaire, Kant, Goethe, Nietzsche, Sartre, Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Böll, Borges, and many others.

This book provides a series of translations of ancient texts relating to the life of Socrates, raising questions about his earlier trajectory among other things. The scattered sources gathered in this volume tell a very different story about the philosopher from that normally obtained by concentrating almost exclusively on his trial and death.

Atlantis is another fabled island-nation, with a history that goes back much further in time than Utopia. The powerful island-nation is mentioned by Greek philosopher Plato as an antagonist to mighty Athens. There are a handful of theories about whether Atlantis ever existed (some claim Plato made it all up). If it did exist, what was the location before it sank below the waves?

Gavin Menzies takes up one of the real location theories in this fascinating book: that Atlantis was part of the advanced Minoan civilisation that extended from its Mediterranean base on Crete to locations much further afield. Since this all took place three millenniums ago, hard to prove anything, although Gavin Menzies tries his best with unearthed artifacts and DNA evidence to persuade the reader as to the veracity of his findings. Perhaps you should read this tale with a pinch of salt? It is about… show more.

A comprehensive, elegantly written survey of the territory from a genuine polymath, Chaos Imagined considers the philosophical issues raised by the turn to disorder and chance in everything from cutting-edge artistic movements to mathematical chaos theory. Meisel moves with agile ease from historical narrative to considerations of some quite knotty theoretical problems in a style that is genuinely readable and elegant, rather than academically abstruse. He is as assured on avant-garde art movements as he is on the more elusive aspects of western philosophy.

This is the OG of utopias—written in 1516 about people living on a distant island. Later writers made up utopias set in the future, but More’s island is still fun to read about. A place where there is no private property, no one desires wealth, all citizens are equal, and all religions are tolerated—though there is no privacy (or premarital sex) either. Nobody knows whether More meant it as satire or longing, or even if we should translate u-topia as “no-place” or “good-place.”

We know that there were women in Ancient Greece who did philosophy like Diotima and Aspasia (Socrates’s teachers) or Hypatia (who was murdered by Christians in Alexandria) or Lasthenia and Axiothea (students at Plato’s Academy).

There are also ancient texts signed with women’s names like Perictione (Plato’s mum), or Theano (Pythagoras’s wife). But we can’t always trust that those texts were written by these actual women.

Do we really think that if Plato’s mother had written philosophy, her work would have turned up a century later with a bunch of fake letters in Alexandria? What Dutsch’s book does is much more exciting than trying to prove that Plato’s mum was a philosopher.

It looks at the texts that these women supposedly wrote, and the stories that were told about them, so that we get to find out what it would have been like to be a woman and a philosopher… show more.

A follower of Socrates, Plato is best known today for his moral and political philosophy. But, unlike Socrates, he was also deeply engaged in natural philosophy.

Plato, however, differed sharply from all the others: he contended that the cosmos was created by a divine craftsman as “a moving image of eternity.”  We treat Plato as a cryptic member of the Pythagorean School. And in Timaeus he expounds an ancient form of mathematical physics.

He correlates the four ancient elements—fire, earth, air, and water—with four of the five regular stereometric figures: the pyramid, cube, octahedron, and icosahedron, respectively. These constitute the mathematical—as opposed to material—atoms composing the four classical elements. And Plato correlates the fifth regular solid, the dodecahedron, with the form of the universe as a whole.

The key to understanding our lives is to enlarge our perspectives, and human behavior hasn’t changed much in 2000 years.

Plato gives several suggestions for maintaining stability in organized society, including guarding against the influence of Sophists, who manipulate language to manipulate their listeners, reminding me of our salesmen today.

Especially valuable is his allegory of the cave, where educators present images to an audience chained in place since early childhood. The glare of the sun awaits anyone who manages to leave the cave, and coming back in won’t be easy, but those who leave and find genuine truth need to come back and serve those still in the cave. Make the world a better place.

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that all of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. That might be an exaggeration, but not by much. One of the greatest features of Plato’s philosophy is that he wrote almost entirely in the form of dialogues. His writings modeled the idea that philosophy is an ongoing conversation between different points of view. They also modeled the idea that philosophy is an exchange of reasons, in pursuit of the truth. Plato wrote many great dialogues, every one of them worth reading, but the Phaedo is my favorite. In this dialogue, Plato comes out of the closet as, well, a Platonist, and whether you agree or disagree, it’s a wild ride.  

First published in 1935, The Green Child is among the strangest books you’ll ever read. It enchanted me, forcing me to believe that Olivero, a South American dictator, could fake his own assassination, return to his roots in England, and save a speechless translucent creature, the Green Child, from her sadistic husband. I revelled in the exquisite writing – Sir Herbert Read was a renowned stylist who penned the classic English Prose Style -- and the improbable’s being made real. At one time Norton Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard, Read called his novel a philosophical myth to which ‘all types of Fantasy should conform’. It was his only long fiction. One reviewer called it an ‘organic fusion of thought and imagination into a crystalline beauty’.

This is one of the most important books I have ever read. It changed the way I think about Socrates, Plato, Foucault, and Nietzsche. It gave me a deep appreciation of the philosophical and ethical importance of irony as a way of being in the world. It convinced me to spend all my free time for several months reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, and it made me see the relationship between ancient philosophy and modern life in a fundamentally new way. It is simply one of the most beautifully written and suggestive books of modern philosophy published in English in the last fifty years.

In 2009, I dislocated and broke my ankle in the Honolulu airport. Bedridden after surgery, I remembered a friend had given me a copy of The Secret. I read it in one sitting and had an epiphany! I have been manifesting my entire life but didn’t know that it’s name was Law of Attraction. This book catapulted me on my spiritual journey and forever changed my life. I realized I am a deliberate creator and can manifest any desire I want. 

This book grabs your attention right from the start. Four people are on a train, and one of them believes in witches. That’s crazy, right? (The witches part, not the train part.) But can you prove that he is wrong? One character trusts science, and only science. Another is a relativist, who believes that each person’s opinion is “true for them.” And then there is the annoying young philosopher, who is just as irritating as she is logical. This is a great book about truth, knowledge, fallibility, and tolerance. Timothy Williamson is one of the best philosophers alive today, and yet this book is accessible and engaging for anyone who wants to think about fundamental questions. The characters are compelling, and the writing is witty and fun.

Simon Goldhill powerfully demonstrates why we remain indebted to the ancient world in so many ways. It is not just that classical columns often decorate our buildings or that classical legends inspire our films and books, our whole life still bears the cultural and psychological imprint of ancient Greece and Rome. Our current obsession with gyms, for example, stems from the Greek passion for exercising in public (and they did so naked). Gymnasium is in origin a Greek word. While Greeks and Romans took different views from us on numerous things, from romantic love to slavery, the issues they first confronted and debated still matter. Unsurprisingly for the ancient world, far from being peopled with dead white marble statues gathering dust in museums, throbbed with impassioned life. The echoes of their tumultuous lives haunt us still.

The final sentence of The Mask of Apollo has haunted me for decades since I first read the book in my teens. When I read it again, many years later, I discovered that the story is as moving as I remembered. Renault weaves a fascinating re-creation of classical Greek theatre with Plato’s attempt to tutor a true philosopher king in the kingdom of Syracuse. But it’s the final chapter, after Plato’s death, that raises the book to the level of tragedy. For then we meet the young Alexander, already almost god-like in his charisma, a fire seeking fuel for its burning. Alexander burns through the world seeking it, but what he is looking for in the world has already left it: a broken Plato has already died.

Lee covers and connects two of my favorite topics, creativity, and technology. From the facts and truths of technology to the role models play in creativity (looking at how early philosophers suggested modeling thought), he argues that computers are not universal machines and that their power comes from their partnership with humans.

As an author of mystery-thrillers, including the Sherlock Holmes Pastiche, “Elementary, My Dear Spock” as well as a longtime fan of Agatha Christie, I was drawn to the appeal of an ancient Greek “detective”, Heracles Pontor investigating murders in Plato’s Athens. And, Somoza does not disappoint, inviting us to share Pontor’s journey down a rabbit hole that grows ever more intriguing and dangerous page by page. Somoza welcomes us with a beautifully translated murder mystery that soon envelopes us in a fascinating exploration of Plato, reality, and, as reflected in the original Spanish title, the Cave of Ideas.