title: Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed)
author:  Gerald A. Press 
description: "[The book] is comprehensive, full of useful advice for anyone teaching Plato at any level. Press gives us the information we need to have at our fingertips, but his suggestions only increase the excitement of reading the dialogues themselves." - Debra Nails, Professor of Philosophy, Michigan State University, USA<br /><br />"It appears that things have changed in Plato scholarship during the quarter century that has elapsed since I was trained as an undergraduate in philosophy and classical languages and, consequently, a book that I cannot recommend enough is Gerald A. Press, Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed." - Peter Wright, <em>Teaching for Inclusion: Difficult Dialogues</em> (Blog), July 25, 2008 (Peter Wright)<br /><br /><div>"a book such as Press's is very timely. It works out in detail the implications of Plato's use of the dialogue as a literary form, and suggests ways of reading the dialogues in the light of this, recognising such things as the mixture of truth and fiction, the use of irony and the use of myth"</div><div><em>The international journal of the platonic tradition</em>, 2009</div> (A. H. Lesser)<br /><br />&#8220;It appears that things have changed in Plato scholarship during the quarter century that has elapsed since I was trained as an undergraduate in philosophy and classical languages and, consequently, a book that I cannot recommend enough is Gerald A. Press, Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed.&#8221; - Peter Wright, <em>Teaching for Inclusion: Difficult Dialogues</em> (Blog), July 25, 2008 (Sanford Lakoff)<br /><br /><div>"a book such as Press's is very timely. It works out in detail the implications of Plato's use of the dialogue as a literary form, and suggests ways of reading the dialogues in the light of this, recognising such things as the mixture of truth and fiction, the use of irony and the use of myth"</div><div><em>The international journal of the platonic tradition</em>, 2009</div> (Sanford Lakoff)
zlib_text: **Circus**
  
   **by Marta Randall**
  
  _If a man, fixing his attention on these and the like difficulties,_ _does
  away with ideas of things and will not admit that every_ _individual thing has
  its own determinate idea which is always_ _one and the same, he will have
  nothing on which his mind can_ _rest; and so he will utterly destroy the power
  of reasoning._
  
  PLATO, Dialogues, Parmenides
  
  _By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by_ _convention
  bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space._
  
  DEMOCRITUS, Fragment 125
  
   **A**
  
  A1.
  
  The hands look remarkably like our own, but are, of course, different. The
  print is too old and too faint to allow the scoop to work on any other part of
  the figure; only the hands are in focus sharp enough for the scoop to extend
  its invisible filaments into them and run an analysis.
  
  The print is a tool; this much is clear. But the contents of the print, at
  first, baffle us. The hands move without hesitation, continuously, spinning
  twelve 