Plato's Theaetetus

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Description

As with all volumes in the Focus Classical Library, this translation by Joe Sachs adheres close to the original text, providing notes and an introduction to the work designed to give the intelligent reader access to thought and thought processes of one of the seminal works in the Socratic tradition.

About the Author

Joe Sachs taught for thirty years at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. He has translated Aristotle's "Physics," "Metaphysics" and "On the Soul" and, for the Focus Philosophical Library, Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" and "Poetics", and Plato's "Theaetetus" and "Republic."

Review

Sachs’s outstanding new translation of Plato’s Theaetetus is lucid, readable, and faithful to the original. More than that, it is a translation for the thoughtful reader. Through his striking translations of key terms, Sachs compels the reader to think more deeply about Plato’s intent. He shows that Plato’s return within the dialogue to the same word or to its cognates is no accident but signals a philosophical trope in Plato’s thought. The work’s introduction avoids presenting a stock summary of the topics covered or a rehearsal of the failed arguments. Instead, it makes the case for regarding the Theaetetus as Plato’s ‘missing’ work on The Philosopher. Through the ‘variety of attempts, errors, new beginnings, and false turns that the dialogue presents,’ Sachs argues, Socrates provokes his interlocutors and Plato’s readers to strive to cross the boundary between mere opinion and the kind of thinking that is philosophy.
~Roslyn Weiss, Lehigh University