Musings on Plato’s Symposium

A guide to understanding love, and the love of understanding.

In Musings on Plato’s Symposium, Alex Priou offers a holistic interpretation of Plato’s seminal work on love. An insightful commentary presented in short, aphoristic sections, the book is both a way into the depths of the dialogue for serious students, and a philosophical challenge for experts. Inspired by Plato’s own mixture of the playful, prankish, flirtatious, outrageous, and beyond, the book is incisive and innovative in style and substance alike, and it rewards those who wish to approach the mysteries of Plato’s Symposium and its ultimate subject: the meaning of love in its many forms.

Alex Priou is Teaching Assistant Professor in the Herbst Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has written two other books on Plato, Becoming Socrates (2018) and Defending Socrates (2023), in addition to a number of articles on the history of philosophy. He is also the co-host of a podcast, The New Thinkery, with his two friends, Greg McBrayer and David Bahr.