Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is Prof. Annas' second contribution to this series, her first being A Short Introduction to Ancient Philosophy. This one does not measure up to the first. Some of the weaknesses of "Ancient Philosophy" are more evident in "Plato", while the strengths are lacking. My first beef with Prof. Annas is trivial, but annoying, and that is her insistance that the traditional English language usage for the third person impersonal discriminates against females. In order to counter this supposed disrespect of females, she creates opportunities to plunk down a "she" or a "her" where a "one" or "it" or "he" would normally be expected. An example: Annas writes, "Someone who wins the lottery, for example, may well not be made any happier by just having the money. Unless she puts it to intelligent use, the money may do nothing for her, or even ruin her life." So, we were talking about the relationship of money to happiness, when suddenly the topic changes to gender politics. Why not just say, "Unless the money is put to intelligent use, it may contribute nothing to happiness, and may even ruin one's life", and leave gender politics out of it? I purchased this book in order to learn about Plato, not to deal with Julia Annas' feminist complexes. She is excessively agnostic about the order of composition of the Platonic dialogues, dismisses with little discussion the internal evidence for a sequence, and its implications for the reconstruction of a picture of the historic Socrates. My complaint is not that she disagrees, but that she doesn't discuss the issue, which seems to be an important one in studies of Plato. And she really doesn't get to the meat of Socrates' irony and method of inquiry. She devotes an entire chapter to sex and gender issues, only to then dismiss Plato thus: "By this point, studying Plato has little to contribute to modern feminist discussion: his starting points and many of his assumptions are too remote from ours for him to be a profitable partner in debate for very long." If that's true, why did we just spend an entire chapter, 14 percent of a very short book, on the subject? The remainder of the book is taken up with superficial discussions of Plato's views of virtue, the soul, and metaphysics, and ends with a rousing statement of the obvious: "For in the end, his deepest message is not that we should believe in Forms, or the importance of virtue, but that we should engage with him, and with our own contemporaries, in aspiring to understand these matters." I finished her Short Introduction to Ancient Philosophy stimulated to read more. By contrast, reading this book left me with the opposite feeling, that reading more by Annas would be frustrating and a waste of time.