The Open Plato Project aims to create a new kind of digital translation and commentary of ancient Greek philosophical texts, intended for both expert and non-expert audiences and produced in collaboration with scholars from multiple disciplines. This is in service of our basic mission to widen the audience of people who are able to find joy and meaning in the study of these texts. Our core belief is that democratizing the study of philosophical texts is beneficial both to society and to scholarship. The first phase of this project will be to create an online, open-access, and open source translation of and commentary on Plato’s Alcibiades.

You can see a sample of the Alcibiades open source translation with layers of commentary here. In July 2023, the OPP hosted a translation workshop at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC, aiming to produce a collaborative translation of the Alcibiades and hold a philosophical discussion on the dialogue. The participants of the workshop included Hendrik Lorenz (Princeton), Brad Inwood (Yale), Susan Sauvé Meyers (UPenn), Marie Louise Gill (Brown), Grace Ledbetter (Swarthmore), Tushar Irani (Wesleyan), Fiona Leigh (UCL), M.M. McCabe (Cambidge), Verity Harte (Yale), Rachel Singpurwalla (U. Maryland), Emily Fletcher (UW Madison), and Ruby Blondell (U. Washington). The OPP members are currently working on producing and editing a translation of the Alcibiades and layers of commentaries for online publication.

The project includes participants from Boston University, Brown University, Idaho State University, Indiana University Bloomington, Northwestern University, Northeastern University, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and UC San Diego.