Brief Biography
Catherine Zuckert is Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She also currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Review of Politics . B.A. Cornell University (1964); PhD University of Chicago (1970).
Zuckert’s book on Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for the best book written in philosophy and religion by the American Association of Publishers in 1990. Understanding the Political Spirit: From Socrates to Nietzsche, edited by Zuckert, received a Choice award as one of the best books published in political theory in 1989.
Zuckert writes primarily about the history of political philosophy and the relation between literature and politics. Zuckert has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Bradley and Earhart Foundations. Most recently she has been awarded a 2007-08 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to write a book-length study of "Machiavelli's politics." She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, has been listed in several editions of Who’s Who in America, and was selected as a member of the Templeton Honor Role in 1998. |
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Professor Zuckert's Most Recent Book - Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of Dialogues (University of Chicago Press, May 2009).
Faced with the difficult task of discerning Plato’s true ideas from the contradictory voices he used to express them, scholars have never fully made sense of the many incompatibilities within and between the dialogues. In the magisterial Plato’s Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert explains for the first time how these prose dramas cohere to reveal a comprehensive Platonic understanding of philosophy.
To expose this coherence, Zuckert examines the dialogues not in their supposed order of composition but according to the dramatic order in which Plato indicates they took place. This unconventional arrangement lays bare a narrative of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. In the drama’s earliest dialogues, for example, non-Socratic philosophers introduce the political and philosophical problems to which Socrates tries to respond. A second dramatic group shows how Socrates develops his distinctive philosophical style. And, finally, the later dialogues feature interlocutors who reveal his philosophy’s limitations. Despite these limitations, Zuckert concludes, Plato made Socrates the dialogues’ central figure because Socrates raises the fundamental human question: what is the best way to live? |
