VLASTOS, G., — Socrates. Ironist and Moral Philosopher.

Cornell University Press, New York, 1992. Reprint 1st ed. XII,334p. Paperback. 'In this eagerly awaited book Gregory Vlastos presents a volume of 'Socratic studies' to complement his magisterial 'Platonic Studies' (…). The parallel is apt, since both works are products of a common method an an unmistakable authorial personality inextricably linked with it. The method is the minute dissection of Platonic texts, sensitive to every nuance of vocabulary and idiom, and scrupulously attentive to the highest demands of analytic rigor, applied with inexhaustible patience and unwavering self-criticism in an unending succession of seminars, lectures, papers, revisions of papers, additional notes, etc. The personality is precisely that which would find such a method congenial, patient, exact, unremittingly thorough, above all open-minded and generous to a fault in acknowledging debts to, and more generally the merits of, the work of others. (…) The main interest of the work is, then, less in novelty of content than in its presentation of a synoptic view of a field hitherto surveyed piecemeal.' (C.C.W. TAYLOR in The Philosophical Quarterly 1992, p.228).