Is pic related any good?
I've read some plato and some aristotle, but I'm wondering if I've missed anything that could be pointed out by an actual scholar rather than my own interpretation.
What books, other than those written by the philosophers themselves, are good for explaining the views of a given philosopher?
Any will do, it doesn't have to be plato/aristotle
>>7990712
RE: the Herman book, it's not very good. It's a pop book, with a pop understanding of Plato and Aristotle, which uses a bunch of assumptions about the characters and lives of each that are really based more on modern assumptions than anything that's either attested or in the texts themselves. The worst is this dumb assumption that Plato dismisses experience, which is simply not true and which is brought up over and over again as a starting point for all inquiries in the dialogues, and this peculiar take on Aristotle as an empiricist, a take that the early moderns (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes, Bacon) certainly didn't take when they were accusing him of idealist nonsense with his discussion of substantial forms in the Metaphysics.
A better take (that I don't fully buy) is Gadamer's book, "The Idea of the Good in the Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle":
https://mega.nz/#!XYx1XDwK!fkjpKfjZTodDvP2t1cptpJqviKvGr2DVdzRsjdOgcbY
Another good one (that I'm pretty well persuaded by) is Ronna Burger's commentary on Aristotle's Ethics, which reads it as a work of Platonic philosophizing:
https://mega.nz/#!zN4X2CAa!cx7vA6OB3sLClCrSEsto_Mc2JnHJWHzzJa6DUyp01sE
>What books, other than those written by the philosophers themselves, are good for explaining the views of a given philosopher?
To be completely honest, not very much. Commentaries or scholarly works such as that which I even shared just above only hit the mark insofar as they make good sense of the texts themselves. They can be helpful in that way, insofar as they have to be clear enough about the text that when you read the thing itself, the commentary isn't leaving anything out or ignoring anything. It stands and falls in front of you.
Stuff like Werner Jaeger's speculative work on Aristotle's development, on the other hand, is so baseless and marked by modern assumptions and canons of coherence as to be worthless as a guide. In general, while there *may* be development among thinkers, any scholarly works that focus on development almost exclusively, or that raise arguments entirely dependent on a claim of development that cannot itself be satisfactorily shown is worthless. (A lot of scholarship on Plato and Aristotle has this bad tendency.)
When it's done with proof in the texts themselves, it can be pretty eye-opening, however (Hobbes, Bacon, Leibniz).
