1 Plato: Laws, Books I and II Translated with commentary © Susan Sauvé Meyer 2012 (penultimate draft) to be published by Oxford University Press Clarendon Plato Series corrections welcome!
[email protected] 2 Preface/Foreward Why the present volume? Students of Plato’s Laws already have the benefit of a several excellent commentaries and translations produced in the last century. England’s magisterial commentary on the Greek text (1922) continues to be a valuable resource to readers in English, as is the more limited set of notes on the text in Saunders 1972. Neither, however, offers much guidance on points of philosophical, as opposed to philological, interpretation. On many fronts both have been superseded by the excellent commentary in German, with accompanying translation, recently completed by Schöpsdau (1994-2011). The latter contains considerably more historical material than England, and is an indispensable resource for any serious scholarship on the Laws. Readers of Spanish or French have the benefit of up-to-date scholarly translations with accompanying notes by Lisi 1999 and Brisson/Pradeua (2006), respectively. The closest that readers in English have to a philosophical commentary on the Laws are the notes and long interpretive essay that accompany the 1980 translation by Pangle, and the detailed analysis by Strauss 1975, but the aggressively “Straussian” orientation of these works makes them less helpful to readers of other philosophical persuasions. Of course, no philosophical commentary can plausibly claim to be without theoretical presuppositions, and the orientation of the present work reflects presuppositions characteristic of scholarship on Plato by so-called “analytic” philosophers in the English-speaking world over the last four or five decades.