Description: A lively and highly readable commentary on one of Plato's most beloved dialogues.
Brief description: Gary Alan Scott is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Saint Peter's College.
Review Quotes:
"This is a lucid, carefully wrought study of Plato's Symposium, a dialogue whose complex narrative and multifarious themes pose unique interpretive challenges to students and professionals alike. Scott and Welton navigate these treacherous exegetical waters with grace and ease." -- CHOICE
"This book is a very engaging and lucid guide to Plato's Symposium. It offers a close attentive reading of the fine details of this work, paying due respect to both the dramatic staging of the different speeches and the philosophical significance of the diverse views of erotic wisdom. It combines this with an illuminating sense of the larger philosophical issues articulated in Plato's writings. I particularly liked its persuasively maintained emphasis on the centrality of the in-between nature of erotic wisdom. The authors do a really fine job in showing this centrality in its diverse ramifications, as well as very helpfully laying out different forms of intermediacy in both the Symposium and other major works of Plato." -- William Desmond, author of the trilogy Being and the Between, Ethics and the Between, and God and the Between
"This is the best introduction to Plato's Symposium known to me. It offers an elegant and balanced treatment of the major themes and arguments, and deftly unites the philosophical issues with the dramatic context and characterization of the principal figures." -- David Konstan, author of The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature