'The unexamined life is not worth living'. Plato is the foundational thinker of European speculative thought. He was the first Western writer to undertake a comprehensive and rigorous study of the fundamental categories of reality and value, and few philosophers have escaped his influence or rivaled the depth of his works, many of which have remarkable dramatic power and literary beauty. His writings range over ethics, politics, religion, art, the structure of the natural world, mathematics, the human mind, love, sex, and friendship.Richard Kraut explores the intellectual milieu that gave rise to Plato's thinking and emphasizes the influence of Socrates, whose devotion to the examined life and death at the hands of Athenian democracy are memorialized in many of Plato's writings. The full extent of his moral and political thought and its metaphysical underpinning are investigated. Kraut argues that Plato's theory of forms is grounded in common sense, and that his critique of democracy and search for a rational religion continue to be of vital importance.

理查德•剋勞特是西北大學人文學科的莫裏森講席教授。他的著作包括《蘇格拉底和國傢》（Socrates and the State）、《亞裏士多德論人類的福祉》（Aristotle on the Human Good）、《什麼是好的，為什麼是好的》（What is Good and Why），他同時還是《柏拉圖劍橋導讀》（The Cambridge Companion to Plato）的編者。