100 Best Plato Books of All Time

Bryan Van Norden

It’s very readable even if you aren’t a professional philosopher. Take the story of ‘The Ring of Gyges,’ which raises the question of whether you would continue to act like a good person if you had a ring of invisibility that let you get away with doing whatever you wanted to do. That’s a fascinating thought experiment that anybody can appreciate. [source]

David Heinemeier Hansson

I’m about a third through this and still can’t tell whether Plato is making a mockery of Socrates ideas for the idyllic society or not. So many of the arguments presented as Socrates’ are so tortured and with so disconnected leaps of logic that it’s hard to take it at face value. Yet still, it’s good fun to follow the dialogue. It reads more like a play than a book, and again, immensely accessible. It’s fun to see the lines that continue from a book like this to the considerations of the Stoics all the way to Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations and then onto a modern critique and history in that Debt: First 5,000 Years. A conversation spanning millennia. [source]

Jonathan Glover

It contains a tremendous amount of nonsense about what the ideal society would be like. But it is an unmissable book because of Socrates. He invented the method of doing and teaching philosophy that has never been improved on. [source]

Bryan Callen

Bryan Callen recommended this book on the podcast "The Tim Ferriss Show". [source]

Edward Skidelsky

Plato is the founding figure in the Western philosophical tradition and the Symposium is one of his most charming books – you can read it like a novel. [source]

Carlos Fraenkel

Reading Plato can be a Socratic exercise because you’re reading a text that is part of the canon of philosophy but it advances views that are opposed to everything you believe in. [source]

Kenan Malik

Unlike earlier Greek philosophers, such as Diagoras and Democritus, Plato believed in the divine, and much of his philosophy flowed from his concept of a transcendental reality. He provided the resources for the later Christian view of goodness as a transcendental quality. But in his dialogue Euthyphro he also provides the classic argument against looking to God as the source of moral values, an argument that still resonates 2,000 years later. [source]

M M McCabe

The philosophical content creeps up on you when you think all this is merely a rhetorical flourish: it’s completely extraordinary. [source]

Sam Harris

Just a great example of how English should be written and just a great voice to have in your head as a result. [source]

Peter Atkins

It reviews how people have really grappled in a seemingly very intelligent way with very deep questions. [source]

Angela Hobbs

Plato’s Theaetetus asks what knowledge is, and several possible definitions are explored in depth. [source]

M M McCabe

The great contemporary translation is by M J Levitt, with a magisterial introduction by Myles Burnyeat [source]

Eric Ripert

A fascinating study and still wholly relevant. [source]

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Astrophysicist, Author & Science Communicator

Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on planet? … The Prince (Machiavelli) to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it. If you read all of the above works you will glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world. [source]

Ryan Holiday

Author

Of course, this is a must read. Machiavelli is one of those figures and writers who is tragically overrated and underrated at the same time. Unfortunately that means that many people who read him miss the point and other people avoid him and miss out altogether. Take Machiavelli slow, and really read him. Also understand the man behind the book–not just as a masterful writer but a man who withstood heinous torture and exile with barely a whimper. Machiavelli is a glimpse into a time when power was literal and out for public viewing–when he talks about making an example of someone, he doesn’t mean calling them out, he means putting their head on a pike. Don’t let that scare you because we’re not as far from that world as we’d like to think. Deny that at your own peril. [source]

Melissa Lane

It’s really only in the century or so before Plato that writing starts to become a widespread technology… if you think about Homer and Hesiod, they’re passed on through an oral tradition…What we find in Plato, explicitly, is tremendous anxiety and concern about the nature of writing. Of course the great paradox is that he’s writing, he’s reflecting on the limits of writing, the challenges of writing, of this new technology, very much the way we now reflect on the Internet and social media, how is this going to change our culture? Those are the questions that Plato was asking in his own time about writing. [source]

Todd Gitlin

The Greeks matter because some of them, at least, recognized that they were passing through a change in how people frame the world. In their case, it was the change from the oral to the written, and this is of course the subject of one of the Platonic dialogues, Phaedrus. In it, Socrates declares himself fully aware that human capacities can change, and that as memory is displaced or funnelled into print, a variety of changes may set in which affect not only how we know things, but also who we are as human beings. [source]