NEWLY PUBLISHED

My latest book, a fictional Socrates' Prison Journal, has just been published (Print On Demand) by Virtualbookworm.com.

I reproduce below the brief Preface:

The idea of this little book had been luring me for decades. I kept putting it off because I did not feel sure about where to draw the line between representing Socrates' thought and presenting my own. After having published Let Us Philosophize (1998) and Plato: An Interpretation (2005), as well as numerous articles, where I gave my reading of Socrates/Plato, I felt I could give myself free rein without worrying about fencing apart what might be read into Socrates/Plato and what is an accretion, provided always that the accretion be harmonious, in the writer's judgement, with the rest.

Beside the basic fiction of the prison journal, I have, from the start and throughout, introduced anachronistic citations, fictional situations, dreams and divine intimations, to emphasize the non-historic intent of this work. Nontheless, I maintain that my reading is truer to the genuine spirit of the Socratic-Platonic philosophy than much that goes as scholarly and erudite analysis and exposition.

I am aware that there is much reiteration in the following pages. I go back again and again to the same subject and repeat again and again the same thoughts in various forms of expression. I feel that this is necessary, since one of my main concerns in this as in my other writings is to correct what I see as grave misunderstandings and distortions that have become firmly established within mainstream philosophical thought; I am also trying to introduce and clarify concepts and views which I claim to be original and important. Both these tasks call for and justify much reiteration and much insistence.

The notes appended to the journal are of a dual nature. The biographical and historical notes are for the the benefit of the lay reader or the novice. These notes, when not drawn directly from the dialogues of Plato, are derived from sources that are readily accessible. With respect to these, I claim no originality and make no pretence of erudition. They are bits of common knowledge which I collect here simply for convenience. In the remaining notes I expand somewhat, for the purpose of clarification or emphasis, on certain ideas and views presented in the journal.

Following the notes I have reproduced in an Appendix an article which first appeared in Philosophy Pathways Issue 69, 19 October, 2003, in which I summarized a brilliant paper by Professor Enid Bloch on Plato's description of Socrates' last moments. Professor Bloch's paper deserves to be widely known as it corrects a mistaken objection to Plato's immortal portrayal of one of the most touching and inspiring scenes in human history.

For a further brief description of the contents of the book, go to: http://www.virtualbookworm.com/socratesprisonjournal.htmll

PLATO: AN INTERPRETATION (2005)

D. R. Khashaba

published by Virtualbookworm.com Publishing

(Print-on-Demand)

From the Preface:

"It has been said that Plato probably 'has never been studied more intensively than in the late twentieth century.' Unfortunately we can also say that Plato probably has never been more misunderstood, travestied, and disfigured than in that same period. …  scholars no longer interpreted but dissected. They murdered Plato and were happily cutting up the cadaver into tiny pieces to examine them under their analytical microscopes.

    "It was not the intention of Plato in his writings … to expound a finished system of philosophy. … [but] to ignite in the souls of his hearers and readers that spark of understanding which 'suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, … is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself', as he puts it in Epistle VII.

    "It is therefore worse than useless … to subject the writings of Plato to minute analysis and formal criticism in an attempt to extort from them hard-fixed doctrines and a theoretical system. Plato's writings should be approached imaginatively, responsively, that we may glimpse in them the ineffable insights that could only be conveyed in myth and metaphor but never in fixed theoretical formulations.

    "I enter into living dialogue with the living Plato and offer the understanding I come out with for myself … I do what Plotinus did, what Augustine did, I draw from the flowing founts of Plato to water my own garden. and offer my version of Platonism for what it may be worth intrinsically."

http://www.virtualbookworm.com/platoaninterpretation.html

WHY BACK TO SOCRATES?

"Socrates was not concerned with the world but only with the ideals and values by which alone we live our specifically human life. And those ideals and values we do not find in the world but are born in the mind: it is only in the mind and the ideas of the mind that we have that life of intelligence in virtue of which we are human beings and which constitutes our true worth. Hence Socrates drew a line between scientific investigation, concerned with the factual, the actual and the existent, on the one hand, and philosophical inquiry, concerned with ideals and values, on the other hand." [From "On What Is Real: An Answer to Quine's 'On What There Is'".]

"I maintain that philosophical thinking is creative, concerned with generating ideas and ideals that give meaning and value to the world and

to the life of man and that it is necessary that philosophers go back to the Socratic insight and realize the radical distinction between philosophy on the one hand and natural science and mathematics on the other hand." [From "Philosophy as Prophecy".]

"We now live under a veritable deluge of information, of facts; facts which are all surface, with nothing beneath. More than ever before, we now need to stop and think - meditate and contemplate - and put meaning into the world. Only creative philosophy can help us do that." [From  "A Confessed Heresy".]

CONTENTS OF THIS SITE (For access, go to the frames on top):

A: Full text of Let Us Philosophize (London, 1998)

Modern thinkers, applying the criteria of science, found traditional philosophy false and meaningless: philosophy was reduced to specialised disciplines and techniques that cannot approach the ultimate questions that originally gave rise to Philosophy. For the guidance of life we were left with dogmatic religion on the one hand and the nihilism of a science that has nothing to say about meanings and values on the other hand. Only full-blooded philosophy can help us overcome this dilemma; for unlike science, philosophy does not give us factual knowledge, but gives us an understanding of those ideas and ideals which alone give value to life.

B: Excursions into the Dialogues of Plato. (These have now been worked into Plato: An Interpretation.)

C: Essays.