Books by Seth Benardete

Herodotus' Inquiries should be regarded as our best and most complete document for pre-Socratic philosophy. Without being a work of philosophy, its plan and intention cannot be understood apart from philosophy. Here an attempt is made to uncover Herodotus' plan and intention and to link them with their philosophic roots. This attempt requires that Herodotus' way of telling a story be examined, for Herodotus primarily reveals himself in the stories themselves and not in the moral he sometimes draws from them. Once one sees the importance Herodotus himself places in his own Inquiries, his account of Egypt, which has long been a stumbling block on any interpretation, can be appreciated; and Egypt in turn supplies the basis for understanding Book II on Persia and IV on Scythia and Libya. These three books prove to be the core of the Inquiries, for they establish the necessary conditions for both Greekness and the understanding of Greekness, and hence for the following five books on the Persian Wars.

In this interpretation of the Odyssey, Seth Benardete suggests that Homer may have been the first to philosophize in a Platonic sense. He argues that the Odyssey concerns precisely the relation between philosophy and poetry and, more broadly, the rational and the irrational in human beings.

In this section-by-section commentary, Benardete argues that Plato's Republic is a holistic analysis of the beautiful, the good, and the just. This book provides a fresh interpretation of the Republic and a new understanding of philosophy as practised by Plato and Socrates.

Interprets and pairs two important Platonic dialogs, the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, illuminating Socrates' notion of rhetoric and Plato's conception of morality and eros in the human soul. This book features a novel interpretation that addresses numerous issues in Plato studies.