R.E. Allen's superb new translations of four Socratic dialogues--Ion, Hippias Minor, Laches, and Protagoras--bring these classic texts to life for modern readers. Allen introduces and comments on the dialogues in an accessible way, inviting the reader to reexamine the issues continually raised in Plato's works.
In his detailed commentary, Allen closely examines the major themes and central arguments of each dialogue, with particular emphasis on Protagoras. He clarifies each of Plato's arguments and its refutation; places the themes in historical...

Among Plato's later dialogues, the Parmenides is one of the most significant. Not only a document of profound philosophical importance in its own right, it also contributes to the understanding of Platonic dialogues that followed it, and it exhibits the foundations of the physics and ontology that Aristotle offered in his Physics and Metaphysics VII.

In this book, R.E. Allen provides a superb translation of the Parmenides along with a structural analysis that procedes on the assumption that formal elements, logical and dramatic, are important to its...