Socrates on friendship and community : reflections on Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis /

This is a book that avid readers of Plato's Socratic dialogues will enjoy. Nichols (Baylor Univ.) is such a reader, and she has written a close, insightful analysis of the Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis. She addresses the central questions of friendship and community found in the three. She begins by examining the modern interpretations of Socratic philosophizing that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche present. She uses them as challenging foils in developing her own viewpoint. She argues that Plato's Socrates does provide readers with a penetrating understanding of the role that love and friendship can and ought to play in a community's political life. Her analysis and argument runs hard against ancient and modern critics of Socratic philosophy who think it cannot but subvert the life of a political community. She presents a strong case in favor of Socrates' many-sided, dialectical examination of the relation between friendship and the political. Reading (or re-reading) the three dialogues along with Nichols's book would be time well spent for a serious reader. Plato, undoubtedly, would have been delighted with anyone who might do so. This book is not a cursory read, nor is it for the fainthearted reader. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students, graduate students, and research faculty. C. A. Linden emeritus, George Washington University