Xanthippic Dialogues: A Philosophical Fiction

by Roger Scruton

Overview

The real Plato is revealed to us, by the women whom he banished from his arguments.

In Plato's dialogues, an idealised Socrates expounds the ideas for which Plato will, until the end of history, be famous. The world of Forms; the ideal Republic with its totalitarian masterplan; the tribute to Eros, god of love (or at least of homosexual love); the promise of soul's salvation - all this has come down to us in the distinctive tone of Plato's teacher.

But how much of it did Socrates believe? Were Plato's contemporaries really taken in? Who was Plato anyway? And what lay behind his philosophy, from which the real world of men and women was so rigorously excluded?

Until the discovery of the Xanthippic Dialogues, we had no answers to those questions. Now the real Plato is revealed to us, by the women whom he banished from his arguments. In this brilliant and witty exposé, the mask of abstraction is lifted, to reveal the truth that lies beneath. And the truth is Xanthippe: wife of Socrates, teacher of Aristole, and Founding Mother of the Western world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781448210480
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	10/22/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Roger Scruton was born on 27 February 1944, and was raised in Marlow and High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire with his two sisters. He was educated at Royal Grammar School High Wycombe, from which he was expelled shortly after winning a scholarship to Cambridge. He studied moral sciences at Jesus College from 1962, receiving a BA in 1965, incepted as MA in 1967. He was awarded a PhD in 1972 for a thesis on aesthetics, also from Cambridge.

After graduating, Scruton spent two years abroad before pursuing an academic career in philosophy, first in Cambridge and then in London. In 1990, he took a year's leave of absence to work for an educational charity in Czechoslovakia.

He then taught part-time at Boston University Massachusetts until the end of 1994, while building up a public affairs consultancy in Eastern Europe. He currently holds three positions: visiting professor at Oxford University; visiting professor in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.
Sir Roger Scruton is widely seen as one of the greatest conservative thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and a polymath who wrote a wide array of fiction, non-fiction and reviews. He was the author of over fifty books.

A graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge, Scruton was Professor of Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London; University Professor at Boston University, and a visiting professor at Oxford University. He was one of the founders of the Salisbury Review, contributed regularly to The Spectator, The Times and the Daily Telegraph and was for many years wine critic for the New Statesman. Sir Roger Scruton died in January 2020.