Abstract

The dual responsibility of maintaining our copies of ancient writings in a state in which they reflect their originals intelligibly and authentically and of reinterpreting these writings in a manner which is both faithful and useful to later generations and their problems is so demanding that it has very frequently seemed justly to call forth a division of labor. But the divorce between the scholar and the philosophical interpreter has not always been fertile, as the more pedantic and frantic interpretations of Plato demonstrate. Professor Brumbaugh seeks to avoid the specialist's isolation by uniting the two functions in his Plato on the One. The result is the unusual combination of the soundest and most elaborate work on the text of the second part of the Parmenides, so far as I can determine, yet done in this country, and in addition some very imaginative and varied philosophical interpretations.