(Pantheon, $30)
“Every generation could use a Plato,” said Clancy Martin in The Atlantic. If you doubt it, pick up Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s “ingenious, entertaining, and challenging new book.” In an attempt to challenge the widespread contemporary assumption that science is leading us ever closer to resolving all mysteries, the ever-inventive philosopher-novelist has imagined Plato on tour in America engaging members of today’s chattering class in friendly dialogues that expose the inadequacies of various accepted paths to wisdom. The idea of pitting an ancient Greek philosopher against a Google engineer or panel of parenting experts may sound “dangerously facile and cute.” But Goldstein “mostly pulls it off,” often letting Plato make his best points in words he wrote 2,400 years ago.
It helps that Goldstein is “smarter than me, you, and most people on earth,” said Matthew Price in The Boston Globe. In fact, part of me wishes she’d dispensed with her fictional chapters, because the rest of the book shows her to be “a buoyant, witty stylist who parses intractably difficult philosophical and religious ideas with breathtaking ease.” But her dialogues do offer benefits, allowing Plato “to serve as a foil for the preoccupations of the 21st century.” The Google engineer is taken to task for arguing that crowdsourcing can teach us the best way to live. A neuroscientist is undressed for assuming that his field is rendering philosophy obsolete. A Bill O’Reilly–like cable-news host fails to bully Plato into accepting God’s existence. Even when Goldstein is guessing what Plato might say, said John Wilwol in the San Francisco Chronicle, her speculations are “informed by a lifetime of learning.”
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Goldstein doesn’t let even Plato off without a challenge, said David Auerbach in Slate.com. When in one fictional scene he urges a young female Ph.D. to seek knowledge for its own sake, he’s made to seem out of touch with real-life money concerns—or with any pressures that steal time from the contemplation of life’s meaning. In the end, Plato can be a maddening figure because he never did get around to defining what living the good life would be. Much as he believed that careful thought might help us conduct ourselves more wisely, he remained skeptical even of his own capacity to discern the answer. As Goldstein puts it, what he taught us above all was that “we should never rest assured that our view, no matter how well argued and reasoned, amounts to the final word on any matter.”
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