Socrates on Friendship and Community

Mary P. Nichols is Professor of Political Science and Department Chair at Baylor University. She is the author of numerous books and articles in the history of political thought and politics, literature, and film. Her main areas of research are classical political theory (for example Citizens and Statesmen: A Commentary on Aristotle's 'Politics'), Shakespeare, and film directors such as Woody Allen, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock. She is a senior Fellow at The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York.

• 1. The problem of Socrates: Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; 2. Love, generation, and political community (the Symposium); 3. Self-knowledge, love, and rhetoric (Plato's Phaedrus); 4. Who is the friend? (the Lysis); 5. Socratic philosophizing.

'… Nichols's reading of Plato's central dialogues on love and friendship … combines the resourcefulness and neediness of philosophical eros with the openness and self-awareness of friendship. Her writing thus exhibits the harmony of speech and deed that is the hallmark of genuine philosophers and true friends alike. Read in the spirit in which it is written, her fine book will yield abundant fruit for years to come.' The Review of Politics