This pioneering translation of Plato's Phaedrus, with detailed summary and full philological and exegetical notes taking into consideration all commentaries since Hermias, followed by a painstaking dialogical analysis of the text that shows what we must think at every moment in order to understand the thinking that brings the Greek text to life. In Kenneth Quandt's treatment, Plato's seminal work is allowed to create its own horizon and a new and profoundly unified interpretation emerges: Socrates's conversation with Phaedrus reaches a vision of eros that explains the paradoxes of human nature, explodes the zero-sum game of master and slave, exposes the crabbed fetishism of the written word, and releases the mind to a life of contemplation fixed in a cloudless noon.

Distinguished Austrian sociologist Reinhold Knoll's letters to his grandchildren, written daily during the Covid-19 pandemic, evolved into an obituary of European culture, politics, and society. They also embody a gesture of thanks to the United States, which took a different path from Europe and then saved it in World War I and World War II. Like Beethoven's piano sonatas, some of Professor Knoll's letters are light and humorous while others plumb the depths of the human psyche. But each brings the past into the present, often enhanced by Viennese ironic wit, with recondite and penetrating observations on enlightenment and revolution, art and music, social thought, the devolution of the museum, the status of the church, migration, fashions in pedagogy, and the role of technology in society. This is the remarkable work of a balanced conscience in troubled times. America owes most of its cultural and spiritual traditions to the erstwhile European stewardship of a legacy that goes back to Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome - the subject, verb, and predicate of our human story, - though Europe now finds itself in a crisis of confidence with profound warnings for the American reader.