“The renewed availability of Vlastos’s book to today’s scholars and students is truly important, in several respects. The clarity of Vlastos’s argumentation, his historical knowledge, and his familiarity with the text enable us to make contact once again with one of Plato’s works in which little interest has been shown in the English-speaking world since the Second World War: the Timaeus. They also enable us to see that in this work, Plato pursued in an original way the research on nature and the cosmos that had been inaugurated in Greece a few centuries before him.
What is more, the life and work of Vlastos constitute a particularly interesting testimony to recent history, as far as the links between religious convictions and positivistic thought, and hermeneutics and analytic philosophy are concerned. All these aspects make this new edition of Plato’s Universe a most welcome addition to both Platonic studies and the history of 20th-century scholarship.”
