Plato's Theory of Man

Abstract

THIS study of plato's philosophy is on novel and interesting lines. Prof. John Wild maintains that most modern commentators have approached Plato in the wrong way. “An almost exclusive emphasis was laid upon his epistemology, but his thoroughgoing and elaborate attempt to lay bare the hierarchical structure of human culture, including are life and thought, and his impassioned attack upon that primary cultural disease of sophistry, by which this hierarchy is inverted, to which so many dialogues are primarily devoted, were either disregarded or dismissed as the petulant defense of an archaic class society. No one dreamed that the progress-phenomenon of the nineteenth century, vast proliferation of the subordinate techniques together with sophistic decay of the higher arts, had an analogue in the great fifth century of ancient Greece, and that Plato's pointed and profound diagnosis of this as the primary cause of barbarism and tyranny might have a modern as well as an ancient factual verification” (p. 4).

Plato's Theory of Man

An Introduction to the Realistic Philosophy of Culture. By John Wild. Pp. x + 320. (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press ; London : Oxford University Press, 1946.) 28s. net.