Rating: 
Summary: Such a warm and comfy volume!
Review: Usually I don't have a head for collected works: I had much more fun reading Hamlet in a slim, single volume than I would've in the clumsy Riverside Shakespeare. This book is an exception. It is absolutely wonderful to have the world of Plato at one's fingertips; to flip through the dialogues and letters and definitions and just take in a few pages, perhaps going back and reading one entire if one finds it at all interesting.About Plato as a philosopher, it's hard to write a review. I used to be one of the many students to hate Plato; not anymore. My thinking is, The Republic shouldn't be read until a fair amount of other works are read. Plato just says too many neat things--all of them more than make up for the sometimes-doubtful though sometimes quite interesting philosophy of the Republic. Example: "Time is a moving image of eternity." (I paraphrase here...) That's from Timaeus. Now those are the words of a true mystic in touch with the grandness of the universe--not the seeming fascist who wrote The Laws. In order to read Plato, you've just got to focus on all the good stuff the man wrote. When you do this, the seemingly beastly stuff will make more sense--though you may not agree with it. I hasten to add that The Symposium is a much better place to start than The Republic. If you are new to Plato, read this first--and delight: Here is a work both profound, funny, and sexy, just like some of our own century's better literature (Proust, Joyce).
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