These two volumes, edited by the distinguished Cornell University Plato scholar Gail Fine, contain some 37 articles on various aspects of Plato’s philosophy. Most of the articles have been previously published, although some have been revised for these volumes. None dates from before 1970 and almost all are by scholars from the English-speaking world. These volumes will be widely understood to be doing for Plato scholarship in the last thirty years what the three well-known volumes edited by Gregory Vlastos (two on Plato, one on Socrates) did for Plato scholarship in the period between the end of World War II and 1970. Just as Vlastos attempted to assemble the best of Anglo-American scholarship to provide a snapshot of the contemporary ‘state-of-the-art,’ so Fine’s volumes will no doubt be taken to have done the same. Remarkably, most of the essays in Fine’s volumes cover a range of topics and employ a method strikingly similar to those in Vlastos’ volumes.

The quality of the essays is uniformly very high. A number of them will become or already have become standard starting-points for further discussion of a topic. A re-reading of the essays in the Vlastos volumes after reading these would no doubt be illuminating. Having said this much, it is truly remarkable that in roughly 1000 pages of material there is hardly even a mention of approaches to Plato in the last generation other than that of what can best be termed the Anglo-American analytic tradition.