Xanthippic Dialogues - Softcover

Roger Scruton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1856192814 ISBN 13: 9781856192811

Publisher: Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd, 1993

Synopsis

Rare book

About this title

About the Author

Roger Scruton was born on 27 February 1944, and was raised in Marlow and High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire with his two sisters. He was educated at Royal Grammar School High Wycombe, from which he was expelled shortly after winning a scholarship to Cambridge. He studied moral sciences at Jesus College from 1962, receiving a BA in 1965, incepted as MA in 1967. He was awarded a PhD in 1972 for a thesis on aesthetics, also from Cambridge. After graduating, Scruton spent two years abroad before pursuing an academic career in philosophy, first in Cambridge and then in London. In 1990, he took a year's leave of absence to work for an educational charity in Czechoslovakia. He then taught part-time at Boston University Massachusetts until the end of 1994, while building up a public affairs consultancy in Eastern Europe. He currently holds three positions: visiting professor at Oxford University; visiting professor in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC.

From Library Journal

Scruton has created a witty work that operates on several levels: as a gentle satire on the long-lost-manuscript genre, a parody of certain Platonic dialogs, and a tool for teaching some fairly difficult concepts. The preface, which outlines the discovery of the "manuscript," sounds like the plot of one too many novels (as it is intended to), but the "dialogs" have very definite links with ideas present in the "real" dialogs they parody. Those familiar with the Symposium, the Laws, the Parmenides, and the Republic will find Scruton's versions delightful and reasonably faithful to the ideas of the originals. Two of the dialogs presented here are ostensibly written by Socrates' wife Xanthippe?not the shrewish, nagging Xanthippe of the original but rather a bright, articulate, and creative woman. Scruton's characters have a three-dimensional quality that makes his intelligently written satire of the "lost" dialogs work. Recommended for all libraries.?Terry C. Skeats, Bishop's Univ. Lib., Lennoxville, Quebec
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sinclair-Stevenson Ltd
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 1856192814
• ISBN 13: 9781856192811
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320