Socrates on Friendship and Community: Reflections on Plato's Symposium, Phaedrus, and Lysis

In the modern philosophical tradition, Plato's Socrates has been viewed as an alienating influence on Western thought and life. In this book, Mary Nichols addresses Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's criticism of Socrates and recovers the place of friendship and community in Socratic philosophizing. Her rich analysis of both dramatic details and philosophic themes in Plato's Symposium, Phaedras, and Lysis shows how love finds its fulfillment in the reciprocal relation of friends. Nichols shows how friends experience another as their own and themselves as belonging to another. Their experience, she argues, both sheds light on the nature of philosophy and serves as a standard for a political life that does justice to human freedom and community.

Mary P. Nichols is professor of political science and department chair at Baylor University. She is the author of numerous books and articles in the history of political thought and politics, literature, and film. Her main areas of research are classical political theory (for example, Citizens and Statesmen: A Commentary on Aristotle's "Politics"), Shakespeare, and film directors such as Woody Allen, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock. She is a senior Fellow at The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York.