Leo Strauss on Plato’s "Protagoras"

"A Seminar on Plato's Protagoras offers the transcript of Leo Strauss's seminar on Plato's Protagoras edited and introduced by the renowned scholar Robert Bartlett. In this dialogue, Socrates engaged with the sophist Protagoras. In the lectures, Strauss discusses Protagoras and the sophists in relation to the dialogue Gorgias in which Socrates engages with the meaning of rhetoric, all in light of Socrates' pursuit of the question "How ought one to live?" While Strauss regarded himself as a Platonist and published some work on Plato, including his last book, he published little on the dialogues. In these lectures Strauss treats many of the great Platonic and Straussian themes: the difference between the Socratic political science or art and the Sophistic political science or art of Protagoras; the character and teachability of virtue, its relation to knowledge, and the relations among the virtues, courage, justice, moderation, and wisdom; the good and the pleasant; frankness and concealment; the role of myth; and the relation between freedom of thought and freedom of speech"--