In "The Tragedy and Comedy of Life", Seth Benardete focuses on the idea of the good in what is widely regarded as one of Plato's most challenging and complex dialogs, the Philebus. Traditionally the Philebus is interpreted as affirming the doctrine that the good resides in thought and mind rather than in pleasure or the body. Benardete challenges this view, arguing that Socrates vindicates the life of the mind over the life of pleasure not by separating the two and advocating a strict asceticism, but by mixing pleasure and pain with mind in such a way that the philosophic life emerges as the only possible human life. Benardete combines a probing and challenging commentary that subtly mirrors and illuminates the complexities of this dialog with the finest English translation of the Philebus yet available. The result is a work that will be of great value to classicists, philosophers, and political theorists alike.

This volume brings together Seth Benardete's studies of Hesiod's Theogony, Homer's Iliad, and Greek tragedy, of eleven Platonic dialogues, and Aristotle's Metaphysics. These essays, some never before published, others difficult to find, span four decades of his work and document its impressive range. Benardete's philosophic reading of the poets and his poetic reading of the philosophers share a common ground that makes this collection a whole. The key, suggested by his reflections on Leo Strauss in the last piece, lies in the question of how to read Plato. Benardete's way is characterized not just by careful attention to the literary form that separates doctrine from dialogue, and speeches from deed; rather, by following the dynamic of these differences, he uncovers the argument that belongs to the dialogue as a whole. The "turnaround" such an argument undergoes bears consequences for understanding the dialogue as radical as the conversion of the philosopher in Plato's image of the cave. Benardete's original interpretations are the fruits of this discovery of the "argument of the action." TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Introduction 1. The First Crisis in First Philosophy 2. Achilles and the Iliad 3. The Aristeia of Diomedes and the Plot of the Iliad 4. The Furies of Aeschylus 5. Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus 6. Euripides' Hippolytus 7. On Greek Tragedy 8. Physics and Tragedy: On Plato's Cratylus 9. On Plato's Symposium 10. Protagoras's Myth and Logos 11. On Plato's Lysis 12. On Interpreting Plato's Charmides 13. Plato's Laches: A Question of Definition 14. On Plato's Phaedo 15. Plato's Theaetetus: On the Way of the Logos 16. On Plato's Sophist 17. The Plan of Plato's Statesman 18. On the Timaeus 19. On Wisdom and Philosophy: The First Two Chapters of Aristotle's Metaphysics A 20. Strauss on Plato Selected Works by Seth Benardete Index

目录 中译本前言(刘小枫) 序 引子 第一部分 相遇 第一章 芝加哥大学(1948一1952，1954—1955) 第二章 雅典、罗马和佛罗伦萨(1952—1954) 第三章 圣约翰大学(1955—1957) 第四章 哈佛(1957—1960) 第五章 布兰代斯、纽约大学和新学院(：1960—2001) 第二部分 反思 第六章 从模式到活力 第七章 “不确定二分组合” 第八章 爱欲与城邦 第九章 哲学与科学 第十章 基督教与古罗马作家 原文索引

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