Scott M. Buchanan fu un filosofo e pedagogista americano, noto principalmente per aver fondato il programma dei Grandi Libri al St. John's College. Il suo lavoro si concentrò sul promuovere una comprensione più profonda dei testi classici e la loro rilevanza per il pensiero contemporaneo. Buchanan credeva nel potere dell'educazione attraverso il dialogo con le più grandi opere intellettuali dell'umanità. La sua eredità risiede nella promozione del pensiero critico e nella coltivazione delle tradizioni intellettuali.
The Doctrine of Signatures is one of the first and most significant works in our time to show how closely connected the liberal arts are to clinical medicine. It is the seminal work in the recent history of the philosophy of medicine, a field that is enjoying a renaissance throughout the world today. -- Edmund D. Pellegrino, M.D.
Writing in the fourth century B.C., in an Athens that had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Plato formulated questions that have haunted the moral, religious, and political imagination of the West for more than 2,000 years: what is virtue? How should we love? What constitutes a good society? Is there a soul that outlasts the body and a truth that transcends appearance? What do we know and how do we know it? Plato's inquiries were all the more resonant because he couched them in the form of dramatic and often highly comic dialogues, whose principal personage was the ironic, teasing, and relentlessly searching philosopher Socrates. In this splendid collection, Scott Buchanan brings together the most important of Plato's dialogues, including Protagoras, The Symposium, with its barbed conjectures about the relation between love and madness, Phaedo and The Republic, his monumental work of political philosophy. Buchanan's learned and engaging introduction allows us to see Plato both as a commentator on his society and as a shaper of the societies that followed, who bequeathed to us a hunger for the ideal as well as a redeeming habit of humane skepticism.