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If your idea of love is limited to visions of puppies and balloons, The Thing About Love Is... probably not for you. In Polyphony Press' first effort, the heavy topic of love is tackled in gritty, gutsy pieces that cut to core of this complex emotion. Sometimes it's bliss, sometimes it's bizarre, and quite often it hurts, but regardless of its form, love is always intriguing. This anthology is in keeping with that notion. With a variety of styles and voices, the works featured here are unanimous in their ability to draw the reader in and keep him hooked. It is truly a great read that may challenge one's personal definition of love. Call it an enjoyable experiment in mind expansion!

It's difficult to find an anthology that has as much stopping power as this one. Reading it, I was impressed not only by the diversity of the authorial voices, but also by their veracity. Each story, poem and play seems to have come straight from the gut. What's more, the contributing writers help to remove our blinders; particularly when it comes to matters of the heart. Love, they argue, is nothing less than a battlefield on which each of us daily chances victory or defeat.Those seeking to enter the contest fully armed would do well to buy this book.

Anthologies are not my usual choice of reading material, but as this was recommended to me, I decided to give it a try. I was pleasantly surprised. While I could not relate to some of the pieces here, I enjoyed the underlying topic immensely. The poetry, drama, and short stories were a good blend. The Thing About Love Is... an enjoyable and fast read, but has a peculiar lingering effect that required that I return to it for further exploration. It's a perfect book to read from the relative comfort and safety of your best chair, where you know that you can dip into the joy and angst of love and for once, walk away unscathed.

There probably isn't much I can add in a scholarly vein to what people have already said about Plato. So I thought I would make a few personal observations from the standpoint of a somewhat philosophically literate, 21st century man who is reading such an august classic in middle age.

I came to this book with more of a background in modern epistemology and the philosophy of science than in classical philosophy. So political philosophy isn't exactly my strong suit, but nevertheless I found the book interesting reading in a way I hadn't really thought of before.

Actually, I had read portions of this book 20 years ago when I was a young student first studying philosophy, and I have to say, there is something to be said for having a more mature outlook in approaching such a venerable work. At the time I thought political philosophy pretty dull stuff, and besides, I felt there was no real way to answer any of the important political questions that get debated here, despite the easy way Socrates disposes of everybody else's half-baked opinions and theories.

The fact is, if you move ahead 2400 years and read something like Karl Popper's "The Open Society and Its Enemies," an advanced modern work, you can see how much, or how little, political philosophy has progressed in the last 24 centuries.

Well, that may be true, but at least with this book you know where it basically all started. The best way to decide this issue is to read the book and decide for yourself.

Although entitled "The Republic," this society isn't like any republic you've probably ever read about. Plato proposes an ant-like communism where there is no private ownership of property, philosophers are kings, kings are philosophers, people cultivate physical, moral, and ethical qualities, and the idea of the good takes the place of political and social virtues.

Another odd facet is that the bravest citizens are permitted more wives than those less brave in battle. And then there is the infamous proposition that all poets and artists are to be banished since they are harmful purveyors of false illusions.

I find the Socratic method as a way of moving along the dialogue between the participants sort of interesting, and it is certainly an effective device. However, none of these people, even the Sophist Thrasymachus, are really Socrates' intellectual equal, so he really doesn't have much competition here.

If ancient Athens disproportionately had so many towering intellects, relative to its small population (about 20,000 people, most of whom were slaves anyway), you'd think they would show up in Plato's dialogues more. But all we seem to get are second-raters who are really no match for the clever Socrates.

Yet I would say this is still a great book. Classical scholars say there are more perfect, less flawed dialogues than Plato's Republic, but none that are as profound, wide-ranging, and as influential and important for later philosophy. As someone once wrote, in a sense the entire history of western philosophy consists of nothing but "footnotes to Plato." After finally reading it, I can see why there is so much truth to that statement.

Plato's Republic is unquestionably the origin of philosophical lines of thought which are still undoubtedly relevant today. Written in dialogue form (i.e. like a discussion between many characters), the main exponent of the argument is Socrates, Plato's friend and mentor who was executed by the Athenian government - an event which led Plato to effectively denounce democracy as an impractical system. The Republic is the result of this denouncement: beginning with the philosophical question 'What is justice?', it proceeds to lay out the nature of the ideal state. Along the way, we are given Plato's legandary Theory of Forms, including the fantastically simple Simile of the Cave - a brilliant philosophical exposition of the difference between this world and the 'proper', 'real' world of which Earth is only a shadow. Desmond Lee's translation makes the very best of a particularly tricky task, and compromises on several key passages with effective authority. The main problem for the modern layman is in getting used to the Socratic form of argument in textual form - seeing Glaucon and Adeimantus answering with "Yes", "I agree" and "That's quite right" for 350-odd pages will drive anybody a little crazy after a while! That (very minor) nitpick aside, there are two excellent appendices regarding the philosophical passages in the text, plus a detailed bibliography for those who wish to follow up on the book. And it's worth it, believe you me.

It has been said that all philosophic work of the past 2400 years stands as footnotes to Plato's writings. 'Do the ends justify the means? What is justice? Whom does it serve? Who should serve as its guardians? Is it absolute or relative?'
Plato's protagonist is his old teacher, Socrates. The arguments are presented as dialogues and thus embody a literary aspect different from many, although certainly not all, subsequent philosophical writings. His object is "no trivial question, but the manner in which a man ought to live." The answers are seen to point to the manner in which a utopian society should be operated.
As a storied mountain calls to a climber from afar, Plato calls to the student of the art of thinking. This is why we read Plato, for the "neo-Platonists" -- Plotinus, Augustine, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Whitehead, Gödel, and others -- have certainly propounded improved philosophy. But it is Plato on whom they improve. Most thinkers (perhaps especially most mathematicians and logicians) yet agree with Plato, at least insofar as his understanding of "form" -- often adapted or restated as: ideas / perfection / consciousness / mind / or, 'the thing in itself'.
Plato's realm of [what he calls] "forms" acknowledges the mysterious, yet logically necessary, existence of non-material reality. In Republic he views this as the realm of reference in constructing his understanding of an ideal society. We find in the work of subsequent thinkers (and within Plato's Republic as well) that this non-material reality is perhaps more easily recognized in purer considerations of reason, aesthetics, mathematics, music, love, spiritual experience, and ultimately in consciousness itself, than in idealized human social institutions. Mathematics, for example, although readily practiced in material ways, is not itself material. Thus the understanding of the purity of reason as opposed to the synthetic (and uncertain) nature of empiricism, arises from the work of Plato (and is particularly well developed in Descartes' existentialism).
Modern readers should rightly find that Plato regards the State too highly; in pursuit of an ideal State his supposedly improved citizen is highly restricted and censored. His "utopian" citizens are automatons, bred by the State; unsanctioned infants are "disposed of." Where his ideas are wrongly developed, they are in fact important ideas, i.e., they are issues deserving serious examination. Should the ruling class be restricted to philosophers? Plato says yes, that wisdom and intellectual insight are more desirable in leaders than are either birthright or popularity. Of course we, in the democratic West, tend to see this idea as totalitarianism, but it remains an interesting argument.
Although the product of polytheistic culture, Plato is leery of the tangled accounts of the gods received from the poets, Homer, Hesiod, etc. His view of the divine -- that "the chief good" has one eternal, unchanging and surpassingly superior form -- which he also calls "Providence", hints strongly of the common ground which was to emerge between neo-Platonism and monotheism. Like Plato's proverbial cave dwellers, we perceive this transcendent entity through poorly understood "shadows" of the actual truth. Beside its philosophical, literary, political, and theological aspects, Republic is also important as a treatise on psychology, in fact the science of mind seems to have progressed very little beyond Plato's insights. Books 5-7 are particularly fascinating.