## 1. Plato's central doctrines



Many people associate Plato with a few central doctrines that are
advocated in his writings: The world that appears to our senses is in
some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more real and
perfect realm, populated by entities (called "forms" or
"ideas") that are eternal, changeless, and in some sense
paradigmatic for the structure and character of the world presented to
our senses. Among the most important of these abstract objects (as
they are now called, because they are not located in space or time)
are goodness, beauty, equality, bigness, likeness, unity, being,
sameness, difference, change, and changelessness. (These
terms--"goodness", "beauty", and so
on--are often capitalized by those who write about Plato, in
order to call attention to their exalted status; similarly for
"Forms" and "Ideas.") The most fundamental
distinction in Plato's philosophy is between the many observable
objects that appear beautiful (good, just, unified, equal, big) and
the one object that is what beauty (goodness, justice, unity) really
is, from which those many beautiful (good, just, unified, equal, big)
things receive their names and their corresponding characteristics.
Nearly every major work of Plato is, in some way, devoted to or
dependent on this distinction. Many of them explore the ethical and
practical consequences of conceiving of reality in this bifurcated
way. We are urged to transform our values by taking to heart the
greater reality of the forms and the defectiveness of the corporeal
world. We must recognize that the soul is a different sort of object
from the body--so much so that it does not depend on the
existence of the body for its functioning, and can in fact grasp the
nature of the forms far more easily when it is not encumbered by its
attachment to anything corporeal. In a few of Plato's works, we
are told that the soul always retains the ability to recollect what it
once grasped of the forms, when it was disembodied prior to its
possessor's birth (see especially *Meno*), and that the
lives we lead are to some extent a punishment or reward for choices we
made in a previous existence (see especially the final pages of
*Republic*). But in many of Plato's writings, it is
asserted or assumed that true philosophers--those who recognize
how important it is to distinguish the one (the one thing that
goodness is, or virtue is, or courage is) from the many (the many
things that are called good or virtuous or courageous )--are in a
position to become ethically superior to unenlightened human beings,
because of the greater degree of insight they can acquire. To
understand which things are good and why they are good (and if we are
not interested in such questions, how can we become good?), we must
investigate the form of good.


## 2. Plato's puzzles



Although these propositions are often identified by Plato's
readers as forming a large part of the core of his philosophy, many of
his greatest admirers and most careful students point out that few, if
any, of his writings can accurately be described as mere advocacy of a
cut-and-dried group of propositions. Often Plato's works exhibit
a certain degree of dissatisfaction and puzzlement with even those
doctrines that are being recommended for our consideration. For
example, the forms are sometimes described as hypotheses (see for
example *Phaedo*). The form of good in particular is described
as something of a mystery whose real nature is elusive and as yet
unknown to anyone at all (*Republic*). Puzzles are
raised--and not overtly answered--about how *any* of
the forms can be known and how we are to talk about them without
falling into contradiction (*Parmenides*), or about what it is
to know anything (*Theaetetus*) or to name anything
(*Cratylus*). When one compares Plato with some of the other
philosophers who are often ranked with him--Aristotle, Aquinas,
and Kant, for example--he can be recognized to be far more
exploratory, incompletely systematic, elusive, and playful than they.
That, along with his gifts as a writer and as a creator of vivid
character and dramatic setting, is one of the reasons why he is often
thought to be the ideal author from whom one should receive
one's introduction to philosophy. His readers are not presented
with an elaborate system of doctrines held to be so fully worked out
that they are in no need of further exploration or development;
instead, what we often receive from Plato is a few key ideas together
with a series of suggestions and problems about how those ideas are to
be interrogated and deployed. Readers of a Platonic dialogue are drawn
into thinking for themselves about the issues raised, if they are to
learn what the dialogue itself might be thought to say about them.
Many of his works therefore give their readers a strong sense of
philosophy as a living and unfinished subject (perhaps one that can
never be completed) to which they themselves will have to contribute.
All of Plato's works are in some way meant to leave further work
for their readers, but among the ones that most conspicuously fall
into this category are: *Euthyphro*, *Laches*,
*Charmides*, *Euthydemus*, *Theaetetus*, and
*Parmenides*.


## 3. Dialogue, setting, character



There is another feature of Plato's writings that makes him
distinctive among the great philosophers and colors our experience of
him as an author. Nearly everything he wrote takes the form of a
dialogue. (There is one striking exception: his *Apology*,
which purports to be the speech that Socrates gave in his
defense--the Greek word *apologia* means
"defense"--when, in 399, he was legally charged and
convicted of the crime of impiety. However, even there, Socrates is
presented at one point addressing questions of a philosophical
character to his accuser, Meletus, and responding to them. In
addition, since antiquity, a collection of 13 letters has been
included among his collected works, but their authenticity as
compositions of Plato is not universally accepted among scholars, and
many or most of them are almost certainly not his (see Burnyeat and
Frede 2015). Most of them purport to be the outcome of his involvement
in the politics of Syracuse, a heavily populated Greek city located in
Sicily and ruled by tyrants.)



We are of course familiar with the dialogue form through our
acquaintance with the literary genre of drama. But Plato's
dialogues do not try to create a fictional world for the purposes of
telling a story, as many literary dramas do; nor do they invoke an
earlier mythical realm, like the creations of the great Greek
tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Nor are they all
presented in the form of a drama: in many of them, a single speaker
narrates events in which he participated. They are philosophical
discussions--"debates" would, in some cases, also be
an appropriate word--among a small number of interlocutors, many
of whom can be identified as real historical figures (see Nails 2002);
and often they begin with a depiction of the setting of the
discussion--a visit to a prison, a wealthy man's house, a
celebration over drinks, a religious festival, a visit to the
gymnasium, a stroll outside the city's wall, a long walk on a
hot day. As a group, they form vivid portraits of a social world, and
are not purely intellectual exchanges between characterless and
socially unmarked speakers. (At any rate, that is true of a large
number of Plato's interlocutors. However, it must be added that
in some of his works the speakers display little or no character. See,
for example, *Sophist* and *Statesman*--dialogues
in which a visitor from the town of Elea in Southern Italy leads the
discussion; and *Laws*, a discussion between an unnamed
Athenian and two named fictional characters, one from Crete and the
other from Sparta.) In *many* of his dialogues (though not
all), Plato is not only attempting to draw his readers into a
discussion, but is also commenting on the social milieu that he is
depicting, and criticizing the character and ways of life of his
interlocutors (see Blondell 2002). Some of the dialogues that most
evidently fall into this category are *Protagoras*,
*Gorgias*, *Hippias Major*, *Euthydemus*, and
*Symposium*.


## 4. Socrates



There is one interlocutor who speaks in nearly all of Plato's
dialogues, being completely absent only in *Laws*, which
ancient testimony tells us was one of his latest works: that figure is
Socrates. Like nearly everyone else who appears in Plato's
works, he is not an invention of Plato: there really was a Socrates
just as there really was a Crito, a Gorgias, a Thrasymachus, and a
Laches. Plato was not the only author whose personal experience of
Socrates led to the depiction of him as a character in one or more
dramatic works. Socrates is one of the principal characters of
Aristophanes' comedy, *Clouds*; and Xenophon, a historian
and military leader, wrote, like Plato, both an *Apology* of
Socrates (an account of Socrates' trial) and other works in
which Socrates appears as a principal speaker. Furthermore, we have
some fragmentary remains of dialogues written by other contemporaries
of Socrates besides Plato and Xenophon (Aeschines, Antisthenes,
Eucleides, Phaedo), and these purport to describe conversations he
conducted with others (see Boys-Stone and Rowe 2013). So, when Plato
wrote dialogues that feature Socrates as a principal speaker, he was
both contributing to a genre that was inspired by the life of Socrates
and participating in a lively literary debate about the kind of person
Socrates was and the value of the intellectual conversations in which
he was involved. Aristophanes' comic portrayal of Socrates is at
the same time a bitter critique of him and other leading intellectual
figures of the day (the 420s B.C.), but from Plato, Xenophon, and the
other composers (in the 390's and later) of "Socratic
discourses" (as Aristotle calls this body of writings) we
receive a far more favorable impression.



Evidently, the historical Socrates was the sort of person who provoked
in those who knew him, or knew of him, a profound response, and he
inspired many of those who came under his influence to write about
him. But the portraits composed by Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato
are the ones that have survived intact, and they are therefore the
ones that must play the greatest role in shaping our conception of
what Socrates was like. Of these, *Clouds* has the least value
as an indication of what was distinctive of Socrates' mode of
philosophizing: after all, it is not intended as a philosophical work,
and although it may contain a few lines that are characterizations of
features unique to Socrates, for the most part it is an attack on a
philosophical type--the long-haired, unwashed, amoral
investigator into abstruse phenomena--rather than a depiction of
Socrates himself. Xenophon's depiction of Socrates, whatever its
value as historical testimony (which may be considerable), is
generally thought to lack the philosophical subtlety and depth of
Plato's. At any rate, no one (certainly not Xenophon himself)
takes Xenophon to be a major philosopher in his own right; when we
read his Socratic works, we are not encountering a great philosophical
mind. But that is what we experience when we read Plato. We may read
Plato's Socratic dialogues because we are (as Plato evidently
wanted us to be) interested in who Socrates was and what he stood for,
but even if we have little or no desire to learn about the historical
Socrates, we will want to read Plato because in doing so we are
encountering an author of the greatest philosophical significance. No
doubt he in some way borrowed in important ways from Socrates, though
it is not easy to say where to draw the line between him and his
teacher (more about this below in section 12). But it is widely agreed
among scholars that Plato is not a mere transcriber of the words of
Socrates (any more than Xenophon or the other authors of Socratic
discourses). His use of a figure called "Socrates" in so
many of his dialogues should not be taken to mean that Plato is merely
preserving for a reading public the lessons he learned from his
teacher.


## 5. Plato's indirectness



Socrates, it should be kept in mind, does not appear in all of
Plato's works. He makes no appearance in *Laws*, and
there are several dialogues (*Sophist*, *Statesman*,
*Timaeus*) in which his role is small and peripheral, while
some other figure dominates the conversation or even, as in the
*Timaeus* and *Critias*, presents a long and elaborate,
continuous discourse of their own. Plato's dialogues are not a
static literary form; not only do his topics vary, not only do his
speakers vary, but the role played by questions and answers is never
the same from one dialogue to another. (*Symposium*, for
example, is a series of speeches, and there are also lengthy speeches
in *Apology*, *Menexenus*, *Protagoras*,
*Crito*, *Phaedrus*, *Timaeus*, and
*Critias*; in fact, one might reasonably question whether these
works are properly called dialogues). But even though Plato constantly
adapted "the dialogue form" (a commonly used term, and
convenient enough, so long as we do not think of it as an unvarying
unity) to suit his purposes, it is striking that throughout his career
as a writer he never engaged in a form of composition that was widely
used in his time and was soon to become the standard mode of
philosophical address: Plato never became a writer of philosophical
treatises, even though the writing of treatises (for example, on
rhetoric, medicine, and geometry) was a common practice among his
predecessors and contemporaries. (The closest we come to an exception
to this generalization is the seventh letter, which contains a brief
section in which the author, Plato or someone pretending to be him,
commits himself to several philosophical points--while insisting,
at the same time, that no philosopher will write about the deepest
matters, but will communicate his thoughts only in private discussion
with selected individuals. As noted above, the authenticity of
Plato's letters is a matter of great controversy; and in any
case, the author of the seventh letter declares his opposition to the
writing of philosophical books. Whether Plato wrote it or not, it
cannot be regarded as a philosophical treatise, and its author did not
wish it to be so regarded.) In all of his writings--except in the
letters, if any of them are genuine--Plato never speaks to his
audience directly (see Frede 1992) and in his own voice. Strictly
speaking, he does not himself affirm anything in his dialogues;
rather, it is the interlocutors in his dialogues who are made by Plato
to do all of the affirming, doubting, questioning, arguing, and so on.
Whatever he wishes to communicate to us is conveyed indirectly.


## 6. Can we know Plato's mind?



This feature of Plato's works raises important questions about
how they are to be read, and has led to considerable controversy among
those who study his writings. Since he does not himself affirm
anything in any of his dialogues, can we ever be on secure ground in
attributing a philosophical doctrine to him (as opposed to one of his
characters)? Did he himself have philosophical convictions, and can we
discover what they were? Are we justified in speaking of "the
philosophy of Plato"? Or, if we attribute some view to Plato
himself, are we being unfaithful to the spirit in which he intended
the dialogues to be read? Is his whole point, in refraining from
writing treatises, to discourage the readers of his works from asking
what their author believes and to encourage them instead simply to
consider the plausibility or implausibility of what his characters are
saying? Is that why Plato wrote dialogues? If not for this reason,
then what *was* his purpose in refraining from addressing his
audience in a more direct way (see Griswold 1988, Klagge and Smith
1992, Press 2002)? There are other important questions about the
particular shape his dialogues take: for example, why does Socrates
play such a prominent role in so many of them, and why, in some of
these works, does Socrates play a smaller role, or none at all?



Once these questions are raised and their difficulty acknowledged, it
is tempting, in reading Plato's works and reflecting upon them,
to adopt a strategy of extreme caution. Rather than commit oneself to
any hypothesis about what he is trying to communicate to his readers,
one might adopt a stance of neutrality about his intentions, and
confine oneself to talking only about what is said by his
*dramatis* *personae*. One cannot be faulted, for
example, if one notes that, in Plato's *Republic*,
Socrates argues that justice in the soul consists in each part of the
soul doing its own. It is equally correct to point out that other
principal speakers in that work, Glaucon and Adeimantus, accept the
arguments that Socrates gives for that definition of justice. Perhaps
there is no need for us to say more--to say, for example, that
Plato himself agrees that this is how justice should be defined, or
that Plato himself accepts the arguments that Socrates gives in
support of this definition. And we might adopt this same
"minimalist" approach to *all* of Plato's
works. After all, is it of any importance to discover what went on
inside his head as he wrote--to find out whether he himself
endorsed the ideas he put in the mouths of his characters, whether
they constitute "the philosophy of Plato"? Should we not
read his works for their intrinsic philosophical value, and not as
tools to be used for entering into the mind of their author? We know
what Plato's characters say--and isn't that all that
we need, for the purpose of engaging with his works
philosophically?



But the fact that we know what Plato's characters *say*
does not show that by refusing to entertain any hypotheses about what
the author of these works is trying to communicate to his readers we
can understand what those characters *mean* by what they say.
We should not lose sight of this obvious fact: it is Plato, not any of
his *dramatis personae*, who is reaching out to a readership
and trying to influence their beliefs and actions by means of his
literary actions. When we ask whether an argument put forward by a
character in Plato's works should be read as an effort to
persuade us of its conclusion, or is better read as a revelation of
how foolish that speaker is, we are asking about what *Plato*
as author (not that character) is trying to lead us to believe,
through the writing that he is presenting to our attention. We need to
interpret the work itself to find out what it, or Plato the author, is
saying. Similarly, when we ask how a word that has several different
senses is best understood, we are asking what Plato means to
communicate to us through the speaker who uses that word. We should
not suppose that we can derive much philosophical value from
Plato's writings if we refuse to entertain any thoughts about
what use he intends us to make of the things his speakers say.
Penetrating the mind of Plato and comprehending what his interlocutors
mean by what they say are not two separate tasks but one, and if we do
not ask what his interlocutors mean by what they say, and what the
dialogue itself indicates we should think about what they mean, we
will not profit from reading his dialogues.



Furthermore, the dialogues have certain characteristics that are most
easily explained by supposing that Plato is using them as vehicles for
inducing his readers to become convinced (or more convinced than they
already are) of certain propositions--for example, that there are
forms, that the soul is not corporeal, that knowledge can be acquired
only by means of a study of the forms, and so on. Why, after all, did
Plato write so many works (for example: *Phaedo*,
*Symposium*, *Republic*, *Phaedrus*,
*Theaetetus*, *Sophist*, *Statesman*,
*Timaeus*, *Philebus*, *Laws*) in which one
character dominates the conversation (often, but not always, Socrates)
and convinces the other speakers (at times, after encountering initial
resistance) that they should accept or reject certain conclusions, on
the basis of the arguments presented? The only plausible way of
answering that question is to say that these dialogues were intended
by Plato to be devices by which he might induce the audience for which
they are intended to reflect on and accept the arguments and
conclusions offered by his principal interlocutor. (It is noteworthy
that in *Laws*, the principal speaker--an unnamed visitor
from Athens--proposes that laws should be accompanied by
"preludes" in which their philosophical basis is given as
full an explanation as possible. The educative value of written texts
is thus explicitly acknowledged by Plato's dominant speaker. If
preludes can educate a whole citizenry that is prepared to learn from
them, then surely Plato thinks that other sorts of written
texts--for example, his own dialogues--can also serve an
educative function.)



This does not mean that Plato thinks that his readers can become wise
simply by reading and studying his works. On the contrary, it is
highly likely that he wanted all of his writings to be supplementary
aids to philosophical conversation: in one of his works, he has
Socrates warn his readers against relying solely on books, or taking
them to be authoritative. They are, Socrates says, best used as
devices that stimulate the readers' memory of discussions they
have had (*Phaedrus* 274e-276d). In those face-to-face
conversations with a knowledgeable leader, positions are taken,
arguments are given, and conclusions are drawn. Plato's
writings, he implies in this passage from *Phaedrus*, will work
best when conversational seeds have already been sown for the
arguments they contain.


## 7. Socrates as the dominant speaker



If we take Plato to be trying to persuade us, in many of his works, to
accept the conclusions arrived at by his principal interlocutors (or
to persuade us of the refutations of their opponents), we can easily
explain why he so often chooses Socrates as the dominant speaker in
his dialogues. Presumably the contemporary audience for whom Plato was
writing included many of Socrates' admirers. They would be
predisposed to think that a character called "Socrates"
would have all of the intellectual brilliance and moral passion of the
historical person after whom he is named (especially since Plato often
makes special efforts to give his "Socrates" a life-like
reality, and has him refer to his trial or to the characteristics by
which he was best known); and the aura surrounding the character
called "Socrates" would give the words he speaks in the
dialogue considerable persuasive power. Furthermore, if Plato felt
strongly indebted to Socrates for many of his philosophical techniques
and ideas, that would give him further reason for assigning a dominant
role to him in many of his works. (More about this in section 12.)



Of course, there are other more speculative possible ways of
explaining why Plato so often makes Socrates his principal speaker.
For example, we could say that Plato was trying to undermine the
reputation of the historical Socrates by writing a series of works in
which a figure called "Socrates" manages to persuade a
group of naive and sycophantic interlocutors to accept absurd
conclusions on the basis of sophistries. But anyone who has read some
of Plato's works will quickly recognize the utter implausibility
of that alternative way of reading them. Plato could have written into
his works clear signals to the reader that the arguments of Socrates
do not work, and that his interlocutors are foolish to accept them.
But there are many signs in such works as *Meno*,
*Phaedo*, *Republic*, and *Phaedrus* that point
in the opposite direction. (And the great admiration Plato feels for
Socrates is also evident from his *Apology*.) The reader is
given every encouragement to believe that the reason why Socrates is
successful in persuading his interlocutors (on those occasions when he
does succeed) is that his arguments are powerful ones. The reader, in
other words, is being encouraged by the author to accept those
arguments, if not as definitive then at least as highly arresting and
deserving of careful and full positive consideration. When we
interpret the dialogues in this way, we cannot escape the fact that we
are entering into the mind of Plato, and attributing to him, their
author, a positive evaluation of the arguments that his speakers
present to each other.


## 8. Links between the dialogues



There is a further reason for entertaining hypotheses about what Plato
intended and believed, and not merely confining ourselves to
observations about what sorts of people his characters are and what
they say to each other. When we undertake a serious study of Plato,
and go beyond reading just one of his works, we are inevitably
confronted with the question of how we are to link the work we are
currently reading with the many others that Plato composed.
Admittedly, many of his dialogues make a fresh start in their setting
and their interlocutors: typically, Socrates encounters a group of
people many of whom do not appear in any other work of Plato, and so,
as an author, he needs to give his readers some indication of their
character and social circumstances. But often Plato's characters
make statements that would be difficult for readers to understand
unless they had already read one or more of his other works. For
example, in *Phaedo* (73a-b), Socrates says that one argument
for the immortality of the soul derives from the fact that when people
are asked certain kinds of questions, and are aided with diagrams,
they answer in a way that shows that they are not learning afresh from
the diagrams or from information provided in the questions, but are
drawing their knowledge of the answers from within themselves. That
remark would be of little worth for an audience that had not already
read *Meno*. Several pages later, Socrates tells his
interlocutors that his argument about our prior knowledge of equality
itself (the form of equality) applies no less to other forms--to
the beautiful, good, just, pious and to all the other things that are
involved in their asking and answering of questions (75d). This
reference to asking and answering questions would not be well
understood by a reader who had not yet encountered a series of
dialogues in which Socrates asks his interlocutors questions of the
form, "What is X?" (*Euthyphro*: what is piety?
*Laches*: what is courage? *Charmides*: What is
moderation? *Hippias Major*: what is beauty? see Dancy 2004).
Evidently, Plato is assuming that readers of *Phaedo* have
already read several of his other works, and will bring to bear on the
current argument all of the lessons that they have learned from them.
In some of his writings, Plato's characters refer ahead to the
continuation of their conversations on another day, or refer back to
conversations they had recently: thus Plato signals to us that we
should read *Theaetetus*, *Sophist*, and
*Statesman* sequentially; and similarly, since the opening of
*Timaeus* refers us back to *Republic*, Plato is
indicating to his readers that they must seek some connection between
these two works.



These features of the dialogues show Plato's awareness that he
cannot entirely start from scratch in every work that he writes. He
will introduce new ideas and raise fresh difficulties, but he will
also expect his readers to have already familiarized themselves with
the conversations held by the interlocutors of other
dialogues--even when there is some alteration among those
interlocutors. (Meno does not re-appear in *Phaedo*; Timaeus
was not among the interlocutors of *Republic*.) Why does Plato
have his dominant characters (Socrates, the Eleatic visitor) reaffirm
some of the same points from one dialogue to another, and build on
ideas that were made in earlier works? If the dialogues were merely
meant as provocations to thought--mere exercises for the
mind--there would be no need for Plato to identify his leading
characters with a consistent and ever-developing doctrine. For
example, Socrates continues to maintain, over a large number of
dialogues, that there are such things as forms--and there is no
better explanation for this continuity than to suppose that Plato is
recommending that doctrine to his readers. Furthermore, when Socrates
is replaced as the principal investigator by the visitor from Elea (in
*Sophist* and *Statesman*), the existence of forms
continues to be taken for granted, and the visitor criticizes any
conception of reality that excludes such incorporeal objects as souls
and forms. The Eleatic visitor, in other words, upholds a metaphysics
that is, in many respects, like the one that Socrates is made to
defend. Again, the best explanation for this continuity is that Plato
is using both characters--Socrates and the Eleatic
visitor--as devices for the presentation and defense of a
doctrine that he embraces and wants his readers to embrace as
well.


## 9. Does Plato change his mind about forms?



This way of reading Plato's dialogues does not presuppose that
he never changes his mind about anything--that whatever any of
his main interlocutors uphold in one dialogue will continue to be
presupposed or affirmed elsewhere without alteration. It is, in fact,
a difficult and delicate matter to determine, on the basis of our
reading of the dialogues, whether Plato means to modify or reject in
one dialogue what he has his main interlocutor affirm in some other.
One of the most intriguing and controversial questions about his
treatment of the forms, for example, is whether he concedes that his
conception of those abstract entities is vulnerable to criticism; and,
if so, whether he revises some of the assumptions he had been making
about them, or develops a more elaborate picture of them that allows
him to respond to that criticism (see Meinwald 2016). In
*Parmenides*, the principal interlocutor (not Socrates--he
is here portrayed as a promising, young philosopher in need of further
training--but rather the pre-Socratic from Elea who gives the
dialogue its name: Parmenides) subjects the forms to withering
criticism, and then consents to conduct an inquiry into the nature of
oneness that has no overt connection to his critique of the forms.
Does the discussion of oneness (a baffling series of
contradictions--or at any rate, propositions that seem, on the
surface, to be contradictions) in some way help address the problems
raised about forms? That is one way of reading the dialogue. And if we
do read it in this way, does that show that Plato has changed his mind
about some of the ideas about forms he inserted into earlier
dialogues? Can we find dialogues in which we encounter a "new
theory of forms"--that is, a way of thinking of forms that
carefully steers clear of the assumptions about forms that led to
Parmenides' critique? It is not easy to say. But we cannot even
raise this as an issue worth pondering unless we presuppose that
behind the dialogues there stands a single mind that is using these
writings as a way of hitting upon the truth, and of bringing that
truth to the attention of others. If we find Timaeus (the principal
interlocutor of the dialogue named after him) and the Eleatic visitor
of the *Sophist* and *Statesman* talking about forms in
a way that is entirely consistent with the way Socrates talks about
forms in *Phaedo* and *Republic*, then there is only one
reasonable explanation for that consistency: Plato believes that their
way of talking about forms is correct, or is at least strongly
supported by powerful considerations. If, on the other hand, we find
that Timaeus or the Eleatic visitor talks about forms in a way that
does not harmonize with the way Socrates conceives of those abstract
objects, in the dialogues that assign him a central role as director
of the conversation, then the most plausible explanation for these
discrepancies is that Plato has changed his mind about the nature of
these entities. It would be implausible to suppose that Plato himself
had no convictions about forms, and merely wants to give his readers
mental exercise by composing dialogues in which different leading
characters talk about these objects in discordant ways.


## 10. Does Plato change his mind about politics?



The same point--that we must view the dialogues as the product of
a single mind, a single philosopher, though perhaps one who changes
his mind--can be made in connection with the politics of
Plato's works (see Bobonich 2002).



It is noteworthy, to begin with, that Plato is, among other things, a
*political* philosopher. For he gives expression, in several of
his writings (particular *Phaedo*), to a yearning to escape
from the tawdriness of ordinary human relations. (Similarly, he
evinces a sense of the ugliness of the sensible world, whose beauty
pales in comparison with that of the forms.) Because of this, it would
have been all too easy for Plato to turn his back entirely on
practical reality, and to confine his speculations to theoretical
questions. Some of his works--*Parmenides* is a stellar
example--do confine themselves to exploring questions that seem
to have no bearing whatsoever on practical life. But it is remarkable
how few of his works fall into this category. Even the highly abstract
questions raised in *Sophist* about the nature of being and
not-being are, after all, embedded in a search for the definition of
sophistry; and thus they call to mind the question whether Socrates
should be classified as a sophist--whether, in other words,
sophists are to be despised and avoided. In any case, despite the
great sympathy Plato expresses for the desire to shed one's body
and live in an incorporeal world, he devotes an enormous amount of
energy to the task of understanding the world we live in, appreciating
its limited beauty, and improving it.



His tribute to the mixed beauty of the sensible world, in
*Timaeus*, consists in his depiction of it as the outcome of
divine efforts to mold reality in the image of the forms, using simple
geometrical patterns and harmonious arithmetic relations as building
blocks. The desire to transform human relations is given expression in
a far larger number of works. Socrates presents himself, in
Plato's *Apology*, as a man who does not have his head in
the clouds (that is part of Aristophanes' charge against him in
*Clouds*). He does not want to escape from the everyday world
but to make it better (see Allen 2010). He presents himself, in
*Gorgias*, as the only Athenian who has tried his hand at the
true art of politics.



Similarly, the Socrates of *Republic* devotes a considerable
part of his discussion to the critique of ordinary social
institutions--the family, private property, and rule by the many.
The motivation that lies behind the writing of this dialogue is the
desire to transform (or, at any rate, to improve) political life, not
to escape from it (although it is acknowledged that the desire to
escape is an honorable one: the best sort of rulers greatly prefer the
contemplation of divine reality to the governance of the city). And if
we have any further doubts that Plato does take an interest in the
practical realm, we need only turn to *Laws*. A work of such
great detail and length about voting procedures, punishments,
education, legislation, and the oversight of public officials can only
have been produced by someone who wants to contribute something to the
improvement of the lives we lead in this sensible and imperfect realm.
Further evidence of Plato's interest in practical matters can be
drawn from his letters, if they are genuine. In most of them, he
presents himself as having a deep interest in educating (with the help
of his friend, Dion) the ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius II, and thus
reforming that city's politics.



Just as any attempt to understand Plato's views about forms must
confront the question whether his thoughts about them developed or
altered over time, so too our reading of him as a political
philosopher must be shaped by a willingness to consider the
possibility that he changed his mind. For example, on any plausible
reading of *Republic*, Plato evinces a deep antipathy to rule
by the many. Socrates tells his interlocutors that the only politics
that should engage them are those of the anti-democratic regime he
depicts as the paradigm of a good constitution. And yet in
*Laws*, the Athenian visitor proposes a detailed legislative
framework for a city in which non-philosophers (people who have never
heard of the forms, and have not been trained to understand them) are
given considerable powers as rulers. Plato would not have invested so
much time in the creation of this comprehensive and lengthy work, had
he not believed that the creation of a political community ruled by
those who are philosophically unenlightened is a project that deserves
the support of his readers. Has Plato changed his mind, then? Has he
re-evaluated the highly negative opinion he once held of those who are
innocent of philosophy? Did he at first think that the reform of
existing Greek cities, with all of their imperfections, is a waste of
time--but then decide that it is an endeavor of great value? (And
if so, what led him to change his mind?) Answers to these questions
can be justified only by careful attention to what he has his
interlocutors say. But it would be utterly implausible to suppose that
these developmental questions need not be raised, on the grounds that
*Republic* and *Laws* each has its own cast of
characters, and that the two works therefore cannot come into
contradiction with each other. According to this hypothesis (one that
must be rejected), because it is Socrates (not Plato) who is critical
of democracy in *Republic*, and because it is the Athenian
visitor (not Plato) who recognizes the merits of rule by the many in
*Laws*, there is no possibility that the two dialogues are in
tension with each other. Against this hypothesis, we should say: Since
both *Republic* and *Laws* are works in which Plato is
trying to move his readers towards certain conclusions, by having them
reflect on certain arguments--these dialogues are not barred from
having this feature by their use of interlocutors--it would be an
evasion of our responsibility as readers and students of Plato not to
ask whether what one of them advocates is compatible with what the
other advocates. If we answer that question negatively, we have some
explaining to do: what led to this change? Alternatively, if we
conclude that the two works are compatible, we must say why the
appearance of conflict is illusory.


## 11. The historical Socrates: early, middle, and late dialogues



Many contemporary scholars find it plausible that when Plato embarked
on his career as a philosophical writer, he composed, in addition to
his *Apology* of Socrates, a number of short ethical dialogues
that contain little or nothing in the way of positive philosophical
doctrine, but are mainly devoted to portraying the way in which
Socrates punctured the pretensions of his interlocutors and forced
them to realize that they are unable to offer satisfactory definitions
of the ethical terms they used, or satisfactory arguments for their
moral beliefs. According to this way of placing the dialogues into a
rough chronological order--associated especially with Gregory
Vlastos's name (see especially his *Socrates Ironist and
Moral Philosopher*, chapters 2 and 3)--Plato, at this point
of his career, was content to use his writings primarily for the
purpose of preserving the memory of Socrates and making plain the
superiority of his hero, in intellectual skill and moral seriousness,
to all of his contemporaries--particularly those among them who
claimed to be experts on religious, political, or moral matters. Into
this category of early dialogues (they are also sometimes called
"Socratic" dialogues, possibly without any intended
chronological connotation) are placed: *Charmides*,
*Crito*, *Euthydemus*, *Euthyphro*,
*Gorgias*, *Hippias* *Major*, *Hippias*
*Minor*, *Ion*, *Laches*, *Lysis*, and
*Protagoras*, (Some scholars hold that we can tell which of
these come later during Plato's early period. For example, it is
sometimes said that *Protagoras* and *Gorgias* are
later, because of their greater length and philosophical complexity.
Other dialogues--for example, *Charmides* and
*Lysis*--are thought not to be among Plato's
earliest within this early group, because in them Socrates appears to
be playing a more active role in shaping the progress of the dialogue:
that is, he has more ideas of his own.) In comparison with many of
Plato's other dialogues, these "Socratic" works
contain little in the way of metaphysical, epistemological, or
methodological speculation, and they therefore fit well with the way
Socrates characterizes himself in Plato's *Apology*: as a
man who leaves investigations of high falutin' matters (which
are "in the sky and below the earth") to wiser heads, and
confines all of his investigations to the question how one should live
one's life. Aristotle describes Socrates as someone whose
interests were restricted to only one branch of philosophy--the
realm of the ethical; and he also says that he was in the habit of
asking definitional questions to which he himself lacked answers
(*Metaphysics* 987b1, *Sophistical Refutations* 183b7).
That testimony gives added weight to the widely accepted hypothesis
that there is a group of dialogues--the ones mentioned above as
his early works, whether or not they were all written early in
Plato's writing career--in which Plato used the dialogue
form as a way of portraying the philosophical activities of the
historical Socrates (although, of course, he might also have used them
in other ways as well--for example to suggest and begin to
explore philosophical difficulties raised by them, see Santas 1979,
Brickhouse and Smith 1994).



But at a certain point--so says this hypothesis about the
chronology of the dialogues--Plato began to use his works to
advance ideas that were his own creations rather than those of
Socrates, although he continued to use the name "Socrates"
for the interlocutor who presented and argued for these new ideas. The
speaker called "Socrates" now begins to move beyond and
depart from the historical Socrates: he has views about the
methodology that should be used by philosophers (a methodology
borrowed from mathematics), and he argues for the immortality of the
soul and the existence and importance of the forms of beauty, justice,
goodness, and the like. (By contrast, in *Apology* Socrates
says that no one knows what becomes of us after we die.)
*Phaedo* is often said to be the dialogue in which Plato first
comes into his own as a philosopher who is moving far beyond the ideas
of his teacher (though it is also commonly said that we see a new
methodological sophistication and a greater interest in mathematical
knowledge in *Meno*). Having completed all of the dialogues
that, according to this hypothesis, we characterize as early, Plato
widened the range of topics to be explored in his writings (no longer
confining himself to ethics), and placed the theory of forms (and
related ideas about language, knowledge, and love) at the center of
his thinking. In these works of his "middle"
period--for example, in *Phaedo*, *Cratylus*,
*Symposium*, *Republic*, and
*Phaedrus*--there is both a change of emphasis and of
doctrine. The focus is no longer on ridding ourselves of false ideas
and self-deceit; rather, we are asked to accept (however tentatively)
a radical new conception of ourselves (now divided into three parts),
our world--or rather, our two worlds--and our need to
negotiate between them. Definitions of the most important virtue terms
are finally proposed in *Republic* (the search for them in some
of the early dialogues having been unsuccessful): Book I of this
dialogue is a portrait of how the historical Socrates might have
handled the search for a definition of justice, and the rest of the
dialogue shows how the new ideas and tools discovered by Plato can
complete the project that his teacher was unable to finish. Plato
continues to use a figure called "Socrates" as his
principal interlocutor, and in this way he creates a sense of
continuity between the methods, insights, and ideals of the historical
Socrates and the new Socrates who has now become a vehicle for the
articulation of his own new philosophical outlook. In doing so, he
acknowledges his intellectual debt to his teacher and appropriates for
his own purposes the extraordinary prestige of the man who was the
wisest of his time.



This hypothesis about the chronology of Plato's writings has a
third component: it does not place his works into either of only two
categories--the early or "Socratic" dialogues, and
all the rest--but works instead with a threefold division of
early, middle, and late. That is because, following ancient testimony,
it has become a widely accepted assumption that *Laws* is one
of Plato's last works, and further that this dialogue shares a
great many stylistic affinities with a small group of others:
*Sophist*, *Statesman*, *Timaeus*,
*Critias*, and *Philebus*. These five dialogues together
with *Laws* are generally agreed to be his late works, because
they have much more in common with each other, when one counts certain
stylistic features apparent only to readers of Plato's Greek,
than with any of Plato's other works. (Computer counts have
aided these stylometric studies, but the isolation of a group of six
dialogues by means of their stylistic commonalities was recognized in
the nineteenth century. See Brandwood 1990, Young 1994.)



It is not at all clear whether there are one or more
*philosophical* affinities among this group of six
dialogues--that is, whether the philosophy they contain is
sharply different from that of all of the other dialogues. Plato does
nothing to encourage the reader to view these works as a distinctive
and separate component of his thinking. On the contrary, he links
*Sophist* with *Theaetetus* (the conversations they
present have a largely overlapping cast of characters, and take place
on successive days) no less than *Sophist* and
*Statesman*. *Sophist* contains, in its opening pages, a
reference to the conversation of *Parmenides*--and perhaps
Plato is thus signaling to his readers that they should bring to bear
on *Sophist* the lessons that are to be drawn from
*Parmenides*. Similarly, *Timaeus* opens with a reminder
of some of the principal ethical and political doctrines of
*Republic*. It could be argued, of course, that when one looks
beyond these stage-setting devices, one finds significant
philosophical changes in the six late dialogues, setting this group
off from all that preceded them. But there is no consensus that they
should be read in this way. Resolving this issue requires intensive
study of the content of Plato's works. So, although it is widely
accepted that the six dialogues mentioned above belong to
Plato's latest period, there is, as yet, no agreement among
students of Plato that these six form a distinctive stage in his
philosophical development.



In fact, it remains a matter of dispute whether the division of
Plato's works into three periods--early, middle,
late--does correctly indicate the order of composition, and
whether it is a useful tool for the understanding of his thought (See
Cooper 1997, vii-xxvii). Of course, it would be wildly
implausible to suppose that Plato's writing career began with
such complex works as *Laws*, *Parmenides*,
*Phaedrus*, or *Republic*. In light of widely accepted
assumptions about how most philosophical minds develop, it is likely
that when Plato started writing philosophical works some of the
shorter and simpler dialogues were the ones he composed:
*Laches*, or *Crito*, or *Ion* (for example).
(Similarly, *Apology* does not advance a complex philosophical
agenda or presuppose an earlier body of work; so that too is likely to
have been composed near the beginning of Plato's writing
career.) Even so, there is no good reason to eliminate the hypothesis
that throughout much of his life Plato devoted himself to writing two
sorts of dialogues at the same time, moving back and forth between
them as he aged: on the one hand, introductory works whose primary
purpose is to show readers the difficulty of apparently simple
philosophical problems, and thereby to rid them of their pretensions
and false beliefs; and on the other hand, works filled with more
substantive philosophical theories supported by elaborate
argumentation. Moreover, one could point to features of many of the
"Socratic" dialogues that would justify putting them in
the latter category, even though the argumentation does not concern
metaphysics or methodology or invoke
mathematics--*Gorgias*, *Protagoras*,
*Lysis*, *Euthydemus*, *Hippias Major* among
them.



Plato makes it clear that both of these processes, one preceding the
other, must be part of one's philosophical education. One of his
deepest methodological convictions (affirmed in *Meno*,
*Theaetetus*, and *Sophist*) is that in order to make
intellectual progress we must recognize that knowledge cannot be
acquired by passively receiving it from others: rather, we must work
our way through problems and assess the merits of competing theories
with an independent mind. Accordingly, some of his dialogues are
primarily devices for breaking down the reader's complacency,
and that is why it is essential that they come to no positive
conclusions; others are contributions to theory-construction, and are
therefore best absorbed by those who have already passed through the
first stage of philosophical development. We should not assume that
Plato could have written the preparatory dialogues only at the
earliest stage of his career. Although he may well have begun his
writing career by taking up that sort of project, he may have
continued writing these "negative" works at later stages,
at the same time that he was composing his theory-constructing
dialogues. For example although both *Euthydemus* and
*Charmides* are widely assumed to be early dialogues, they
might have been written around the same time as *Symposium* and
*Republic*, which are generally assumed to be compositions of
his middle period--or even later.



No doubt, some of the works widely considered to be early really are
such. But it is an open question which and how many of them are. At
any rate, it is clear that Plato continued to write in a
"Socratic" and "negative" vein even after he
was well beyond the earliest stages of his career: *Theaetetus*
features a Socrates who is even more insistent upon his ignorance than
are the dramatic representations of Socrates in briefer and
philosophically less complex works that are reasonably assumed to be
early; and like many of those early works, *Theaetetus* seeks
but does not find the answer to the "what is it?" question
that it relentlessly pursues--"What is knowledge?"
Similarly, *Parmenides*, though certainly not an early
dialogue, is a work whose principal aim is to puzzle the reader by the
presentation of arguments for apparently contradictory conclusions;
since it does not tell us how it is possible to accept all of those
conclusions, its principal effect on the reader is similar to that of
dialogues (many of them no doubt early) that reach only negative
conclusions. Plato uses this educational device--provoking the
reader through the presentation of opposed arguments, and leaving the
contradiction unresolved--in *Protagoras* (often
considered an early dialogue) as well. So it is clear that even after
he was well beyond the earliest stages of his thinking, he continued
to assign himself the project of writing works whose principal aim is
the presentation of unresolved difficulties. (And, just as we should
recognize that puzzling the reader continues to be his aim even in
later works, so too we should not overlook the fact that there is some
substantive theory-construction in the ethical works that are simple
enough to have been early compositions: *Ion*, for example,
affirms a theory of poetic inspiration; and *Crito* sets out
the conditions under which a citizen acquires an obligation to obey
civic commands. Neither ends in failure.)



If we are justified in taking Socrates' speech in Plato's
*Apology* to constitute reliable evidence about what the
historical Socrates was like, then whatever we find in Plato's
other works that is of a piece with that speech can also be safely
attributed to Socrates. So understood, Socrates was a moralist but
(unlike Plato) not a metaphysician or epistemologist or cosmologist.
That fits with Aristotle's testimony, and Plato's way of
choosing the dominant speaker of his dialogues gives further support
to this way of distinguishing between him and Socrates. The number of
dialogues that are dominated by a Socrates who is spinning out
elaborate philosophical doctrines is remarkably small:
*Phaedo*, *Republic*, *Phaedrus*, and
*Philebus*. All of them are dominated by ethical issues:
whether to fear death, whether to be just, whom to love, the place of
pleasure. Evidently, Plato thinks that it is appropriate to make
Socrates the major speaker in a dialogue that is filled with positive
content only when the topics explored in that work primarily have to
do with the ethical life of the individual. (The political aspects of
*Republic* are explicitly said to serve the larger question
whether any individual, no matter what his circumstances, should be
just.) When the doctrines he wishes to present systematically become
primarily metaphysical, he turns to a visitor from Elea
(*Sophist*, *Statesman*); when they become cosmological,
he turns to Timaeus; when they become constitutional, he turns, in
*Laws*, to a visitor from Athens (and he then eliminates
Socrates entirely). In effect, Plato is showing us: although he owes a
great deal to the ethical insights of Socrates, as well as to his
method of puncturing the intellectual pretensions of his interlocutors
by leading them into contradiction, he thinks he should not put into
the mouth of his teacher too elaborate an exploration of ontological,
or cosmological, or political themes, because Socrates refrained from
entering these domains. This may be part of the explanation why he has
Socrates put into the mouth of the personified Laws of Athens the
theory advanced in *Crito*, which reaches the conclusion that
it would be unjust for him to escape from prison. Perhaps Plato is
indicating, at the point where these speakers enter the dialogue, that
none of what is said here is in any way derived from or inspired by
the conversation of Socrates.



Just as we should reject the idea that Plato must have made a
decision, at a fairly early point in his career, no longer to write
one kind of dialogue (negative, destructive, preparatory) and to write
only works of elaborate theory-construction; so we should also
question whether he went through an early stage during which he
refrained from introducing into his works any of his own ideas (if he
had any), but was content to play the role of a faithful portraitist,
representing to his readers the life and thought of Socrates. It is
unrealistic to suppose that someone as original and creative as Plato,
who probably began to write dialogues somewhere in his thirties (he
was around 28 when Socrates was killed), would have started his
compositions with no ideas of his own, or, having such ideas, would
have decided to suppress them, for some period of time, allowing
himself to think for himself only later. (What would have led to such
a decision?) We should instead treat the moves made in the dialogues,
even those that are likely to be early, as Platonic
inventions--derived, no doubt, by Plato's reflections on
and transformations of the key themes of Socrates that he attributes
to Socrates in *Apology*. That speech indicates, for example,
that the kind of religiosity exhibited by Socrates was unorthodox and
likely to give offense or lead to misunderstanding. It would be
implausible to suppose that Plato simply concocted the idea that
Socrates followed a divine sign, especially because Xenophon too
attributes this to his Socrates. But what of the various philosophical
moves rehearsed in *Euthyphro*--the dialogue in which
Socrates searches, unsuccessfully, for an understanding of what piety
is? We have no good reason to think that in writing this work Plato
adopted the role of a mere recording device, or something close to it
(changing a word here and there, but for the most part simply
recalling what he heard Socrates say, as he made his way to court). It
is more likely that Plato, having been inspired by the unorthodoxy of
Socrates' conception of piety, developed, on his own, a series
of questions and answers designed to show his readers how difficult it
is to reach an understanding of the central concept that
Socrates' fellow citizens relied upon when they condemned him to
death. The idea that it is important to search for definitions may
have been Socratic in origin. (After all, Aristotle attributes this
much to Socrates.) But the twists and turns of the arguments in
*Euthyphro* and other dialogues that search for definitions are
more likely to be the products of Plato's mind than the content
of any conversations that really took place.


## 12. Why dialogues?



It is equally unrealistic to suppose that when Plato embarked on his
career as a writer, he made a conscious decision to put all of the
compositions that he would henceforth compose for a general reading
public (with the exception of *Apology*) in the form of a
dialogue. If the question, "why did Plato write
dialogues?", which many of his readers are tempted to ask,
pre-supposes that there must have been some such once-and-for-all
decision, then it is poorly posed. It makes better sense to break that
question apart into many little ones: better to ask, "Why did
Plato write *this particular work* (for example:
*Protagoras*, or *Republic*, or *Symposium*, or
*Laws*) in the form of a dialogue--and *that* one
*(**Timaeus*, say) mostly in the form of a long and
rhetorically elaborate single speech?" than to ask why he
decided to adopt the dialogue form.



The best way to form a reasonable conjecture about why Plato wrote any
given work in the form of a dialogue is to ask: what would be lost,
were one to attempt to re-write this work in a way that eliminated the
give-and-take of interchange, stripped the characters of their
personality and social markers, and transformed the result into
something that comes straight from the mouth of its author? This is
often a question that will be easy to answer, but the answer might
vary greatly from one dialogue to another. In pursuing this strategy,
we must not rule out the possibility that some of Plato's
reasons for writing this or that work in the form of a dialogue will
also be his reason for doing so in other cases--perhaps some of
his reasons, so far as we can guess at them, will be present in all
other cases. For example, the use of character and conversation allows
an author to enliven his work, to awaken the interest of his
readership, and therefore to reach a wider audience. The enormous
appeal of Plato's writings is in part a result of their dramatic
composition. Even treatise-like compositions--*Timaeus*
and *Laws*, for example--improve in readability because of
their conversational frame. Furthermore, the dialogue form allows
Plato's evident interest in pedagogical questions (how is it
possible to learn? what is the best way to learn? from what sort of
person can we learn? what sort of person is in a position to learn?)
to be pursued not only in the content of his compositions but also in
their form. Even in *Laws* such questions are not far from
Plato's mind, as he demonstrates, through the dialogue form, how
it is possible for the citizens of Athens, Sparta, and Crete to learn
from each other by adapting and improving upon each other's
social and political institutions.



In some of his works, it is evident that one of Plato's goals is
to create a sense of puzzlement among his readers, and that the
dialogue form is being used for this purpose. The *Parmenides*
is perhaps the clearest example of such a work, because here Plato
relentlessly rubs his readers' faces in a baffling series of
unresolved puzzles and apparent contradictions. But several of his
other works also have this character, though to a smaller degree: for
example, *Protagoras* (can virtue be taught?), *Hippias
Minor* (is voluntary wrongdoing better than involuntary
wrongdoing?), and portions of *Meno* (are some people virtuous
because of divine inspiration?). Just as someone who encounters
Socrates in conversation should sometimes be puzzled about whether he
means what he says (or whether he is instead speaking ironically), so
Plato sometimes uses the dialogue form to create in his readers a
similar sense of discomfort about what he means and what we ought to
infer from the arguments that have been presented to us. But Socrates
does not *always* speak ironically, and similarly Plato's
dialogues do not *always* aim at creating a sense of bafflement
about what we are to think about the subject under discussion. There
is no mechanical rule for discovering how best to read a dialogue, no
interpretive strategy that applies equally well to all of his works.
We will best understand Plato's works and profit most from our
reading of them if we recognize their great diversity of styles and
adapt our way of reading accordingly. Rather than impose on our
reading of Plato a uniform expectation of what he must be doing
(because he has done such a thing elsewhere), we should bring to each
dialogue a receptivity to what is unique to it. That would be the most
fitting reaction to the artistry in his philosophy.