Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, Volume XXIII, 2007

Book excerpt: With one notable exception, this volume contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during the academic year 2006-7. That exception is the colloquium in which Alasdair MacIntyre offers a fresh reading of Plato's Republic. Indeed, most of the papers included in this volume discuss a wide range of topics related to Plato, for instance, the dangers of misology in the Phaedo, the Socratic use of rhetoric in the Gorgias, Plato's anti-hedonism in the Philebus, the link between mythical and logical thinking in the Symposium, and Heidegger's interpretation of Plato's concept of truth. But, apart from this obsession with Plato, there are two colloquia devoted to the Epicurean notion of preconception and to the Stoic conception of the good, respectively.