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Plato's Philosophy: an Overview of Its Influence and Criticisms

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Overview of plato’s philosophy, influence of plato’s philosophy, criticisms of plato’s philosophy, application of plato’s philosophy in modern society.

Brickhouse, T. C., & Smith, N. D. (2006). Plato's Socrates : Philosophy in Plato's early dialogues. Routledge.
Kraut, Richard. "Plato." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 17 May 2017, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/. Accessed 15 Oct. 2021.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Plato.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 28 Jan. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Plato

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Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, summary of plato’s theory of human nature.

Plato (427-347 BCE) “was one of the first to argue that the systematic use of our reason can show us the best way to live.” [Platonic thinking is part of this rise of reason in ancient Greece—often called the Greek miracle. It replaced superstitious, religious, mythological, supernatural thinking with rational, scientific, philosophical, naturalistic thinking. The lives we live today, especially the benefits of science and technology, owe much to this Greek miracle.] Plato argues that if we truly understand human nature we can find “individual happiness and social stability.” [We can answer ethical and political questions.]

Plato’s Life and Works – Plato “was born into an influential family … of Athens.” Athens was at the center of the Greek miracle, the use of reason to understand the world. He was especially influenced by Socrates , but after Athens lost the twenty-seven year Peloponnesian War with Sparta, Socrates came under suspicion and was eventually condemned to death. [Here is my summary of the trial of Socrates .]

Socrates was interested in political and ethical matters, especially about whether the Sophists were correct in defending moral (cultural) relativism . [This is the idea that morality is relative to, conditioned by, or dependent upon cultural conventions.] Socrates believed that the use of reason could resolve philosophical questions, especially if one employed the method of rational argument and counter-argument; the Socratic method uses a series of questions and answers designed to uncover the truth.

Socrates claimed that he did not know the answers to questions beforehand, but that he was wiser than others in knowing that he didn’t know. [This is the essence of Socratic wisdom —he is wiser than others in knowing he doesn’t know, whereas the ignorant often claim to know with great certainty. Using the Socratic Method, he showed people that they didn’t know what they claimed to know. Needless to say, questioning people about their beliefs and implicitly asking them to defend them often arouses resentment and hostility . As Spinoza said “I cannot teach philosophy without being a disturber of the peace”]

Plato was shocked by Socrates’ execution but maintained faith in rational inquiry. Plato wrote extensively, and in a series of dialogues, expounded the first (relatively) systematic philosophy of the Western world. [The early dialogues recount the trial and death of Socrates. Most of the rest of the Platonic dialogues portray Socrates questioning those who think they know the meaning of justice (in the Republic ), moderation (in the Charmides ), courage (in the Laches ), knowledge, (in the Theaetetus ), virtue (in the Meno ), piety (in the Euthyphro ), or love (in the Symposium ).] The Republic is the most famous dialogue. It touches on many of the great philosophical issues including the best form of government, the best life to live, the nature of knowledge, as well as family, education, psychology, and more. It also expounds on Plato’s theory of human nature. [The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously said that all of philosophy is just footnotes to Plato.]

Metaphysical Background: The Forms – Plato is not a theist or polytheist, and he is certainly not a biblical theist. When he talks about the divine he is referring to reason (logos), a principle that organizes the world from preexisting matter. What is most distinctive about Plato’s philosophy is his theory of forms, although his description of forms isn’t precise. But Plato thought that knowledge is an active process through which we organize and classify our perceptions. Forms are ideas or concepts which have at least 4 aspects:

A) Logical – how does “table” or “tree” apply to various tables/trees? How does a universal concept like “bed” or “dog” or “red” or “hot” apply to many individual things? [Any word, except proper names and pronouns, refers to a form.] Nominalists argue that words simply name things, there are no universal concepts existing over and above individuals. [Words are convenient names that demarcate some things from others.] Platonic realists argue that universal forms really exist independently, and individual things are x’s because they participate in the form of xness. [Dogs are mammals because they participate in doginess—which transcends individual dogs.] At times Plato suggests that there is a form for all general words—other times he doesn’t.

B) Metaphysical – are forms ultimately real; do they exist independently? Plato says yes. Universal, eternal, immaterial, unchanging forms are more real than individuals. Individual material things are known by the senses, whereas forms are known by the intellect. And the forms have a real, independent existence—there is a world of forms.

C) Epistemological – knowledge is of forms, perceptions in this world lead only to belief or opinion. We find the clearest example of knowledge based on forms in mathematics. [Hence the motto of Plato’s academy. “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.”] The objects of mathematical reasoning are often not found in this world—and we can never see most of them—but they provide us with knowledge about the world. [Plato is challenging us to account for mathematical knowledge without positing mathematical forms. Even today most mathematicians are mathematical Platonists.]

D) Moral – ideals of human conduct, moral concepts like justice, and equality are forms. [So there are physical, mathematical, and moral forms.] Individuals and societies can participate in justice, liberty, or equality, but in this world, we never encounter the perfect forms. The most prominent of all the forms is the form of the “good.”

The parables of the sun and cave are primarily about understanding forms and the form of the good. [Plato compares the sun’s illumination of the world with the form of the good’s illumination of reality.] Plato thought that by using reason we could come to know the good, and then we would do the good. Thus knowledge of the good is sufficient for virtue, doing the good. [This seems mistaken as Aristotle will point out because our will can be weak.] Thus Plato’s philosophy responds to intellectual and moral relativism—there are objective truths about the nature of reality and about human conduct. [ The allegory of the cave, the myth of the sun , and the divided line are the devices Plato uses to explain the forms. I will explain these in tomorrow’s post .]

Theory of Human Nature – The Tripartite Structure of the Soul – [Having encountered the social self of Confucianism, the divine self of Hinduism, and the no-self of Buddhism, we come to dualism.]

Plato is a dualist ; there is both immaterial mind (soul) and material body, and it is the soul that knows the forms. Plato believed the soul exists before birth and after death. [We don’t see perfect circles or perfect justice in this world, but we remember seeing them in Platonic heaven before we were born.] Thus he believed that the soul or mind attains knowledge of the forms, as opposed to the senses. Needless to say, we should care about our soul rather than our body.

The soul (mind) itself is divided into 3 parts: reason ; appetite (physical urges); and will (emotion, passion, spirit.) The will is the source of love, anger, indignation, ambition, aggression, etc. When these aspects are not in harmony, we experience mental conflict. The will can be on the side of either reason or the appetites. We might be pulled by lustful appetite, or the rational desire to find a good partner. To explain the interaction of these 3 parts of the self, Plato uses the image is of the charioteer (reason) who tries to control horses representing will and appetites. [Elsewhere he says that reason uses the will to control the appetites.

Plato also emphasized the social aspect of human nature. We are not self-sufficient, we need others, and we benefit from our social interactions, from other person’s talents, aptitudes, and friendship.

Diagnosis – Persons differ as to which part of their nature is predominant. Individual dominated by reason seeks are philosophical and seek knowledge; individuals dominated by spirit/will/emotion are victory loving and seek reputation; individuals dominated by appetites are profit loving and seek material gain. Although each has a role to play, reason ought to rule the will and appetites. And in the same way, those with the most developed reason ought to rule society. A well-ordered, harmonious, or just society is one in which each kind of person plays their proper role. Thus there is a parallel between proper functioning individuals and proper functioning societies. Good societies help produce good people who in turn help produce good societies, while bad societies tend to produce bad individuals who in turn help produce bad societies.

Plato differentiates between 5 classifications of societies. 1) The best is a meritocracy , where the talented rule. This may degenerate into increasingly bad forms, each one worse than the other as we go down the list. 2) The timarchic society, which values honor and fame while reason is neglected. In such a society spirit dominates the society and the ruling class. 3) Oligarchy , where money-making is valued and political power lies with the wealthy. In such a society appetites dominate the society and the ruling class. 4) Democracy , where the poor seize power. They are also dominated by appetites. He describes the common people as “lacking in discipline [and] pursuing mere pleasure of the moment …” 5) Anarchy is the sequel to the permissiveness and self-indulgence of democracy. It is a total lack of government. Plato thought this would usher in a tyrant to restore order.

Prescription – Justice is the same in both individuals and society—the harmonious workings of the parts to create a flourishing whole. But how is this attained? Plato believes that education —academic, musical, and physical— is the key. Education takes place in the context of a social and political system. Not surprisingly this includes kings (rulers) being philosophers, those in whom reason dominates. If there really is a truth about how people should live, then only those with such knowledge should rule. [Think of the parallels with Confucianism, where those who rule have mastered the Confucian political texts.]

To achieve this end Plato, the guardians or rulers must engage in a long educational process in which they learn about the Forms. [After a nearly 50 year-long process, those of the highest moral and intellectual excellence will rule.] The guardians cannot own personal property and cannot have families. [The idea is that only the desire to serve the common good motivates them, rather than money or power.] He hopes that the guardians will so love wisdom that they will not misuse their power. As for those dominated by will/emotion/spirit they are best suited to being auxiliaries —soldiers, police, and civil servants. The final class is composed of the majority, those in whom the appetites dominate. They will be farmers, craftsmen, traders, and other producers of the materials necessary for living.

Critics have called Plato’s republic authoritarian or totalitarian, and Plato advocated both censorship and propaganda as means of maintaining social control. He certainly believed that the masses [who he says like to “shop and spend”] were unable to govern the society and that an elite, composed of the morally and intellectually excellent should make the important decisions about how best to govern a society.

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Plato (429?–347 B.C.E.) is, by any reckoning, one of the most dazzling writers in the Western literary tradition and one of the most penetrating, wide-ranging, and influential authors in the history of philosophy. An Athenian citizen of high status, he displays in his works his absorption in the political events and intellectual movements of his time, but the questions he raises are so profound and the strategies he uses for tackling them so richly suggestive and provocative that educated readers of nearly every period have in some way been influenced by him, and in practically every age there have been philosophers who count themselves Platonists in some important respects. He was not the first thinker or writer to whom the word “philosopher” should be applied. But he was so self-conscious about how philosophy should be conceived, and what its scope and ambitions properly are, and he so transformed the intellectual currents with which he grappled, that the subject of philosophy, as it is often conceived—a rigorous and systematic examination of ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological issues, armed with a distinctive method—can be called his invention. Few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank.

1. Plato’s central doctrines

2. plato’s puzzles, 3. dialogue, setting, character, 4. socrates, 5. plato’s indirectness, 6. can we know plato’s mind, 7. socrates as the dominant speaker, 8. links between the dialogues, 9. does plato change his mind about forms, 10. does plato change his mind about politics, 11. the historical socrates: early, middle, and late dialogues, 12. why dialogues, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

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.

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 .

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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 naïve 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The bibliography below is meant as a highly selective and limited guide for readers who want to learn more about the issues covered above. Further discussion of these and other issues regarding Plato’s philosophy, and far more bibliographical information, is available in the other entries on Plato.

Cooper, John M. (ed.), 1997, Plato: Complete Works , Indianapolis: Hackett. (Contains translations of all the works handed down from antiquity with attribution to Plato, some of which are universally agreed to be spurious, with explanatory footnotes and both a general Introduction to the study of the dialogues and individual Introductory Notes to each work translated.)
Burnyeat, Myles and Michael Frede, 2015, The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter , Dominic Scott (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ahbel-Rappe, Sara, and Rachana Kamtekar (eds.), 2006, A Companion to Socrates , Oxford: Blackwell.
Allen, Danielle, S., 2010, Why Plato Wrote , Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Annas, Julia, 2003, Plato: A Very Short Introduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Benson, Hugh (ed.), 2006, A Companion to Plato , Oxford: Blackwell.
Blondell, Ruby, 2002, The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bobonich, Christopher, 2002, Plato’s Utopia Recast: His Later Ethics and Politics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Boys-Stone George, and Christopher Rowe (eds.), 2013, The Circle of Socrates: Readings in the First-Generation Socratics , Indianapolis: Hackett.
Brandwood, Leonard, 1990, The Chronology of Plato’s Dialogues , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brickhouse, Thomas C. & Nicholas D. Smith, 1994, Plato’s Socrates , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dancy, Russell, 2004, Plato’s Introduction of Forms , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ebrey, David and Richard Kraut (eds.), 2022, The Cambridge Companion to Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fine, Gail (ed.), 1999, Plato 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
––– (ed.), 1999, Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
––– (ed.), 2008, The Oxford Handbook of Plato , Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Essays by many scholars on a wide range of topics, including several studies of individual dialogues.)
––– (ed.), 2019, The Oxford Handbook of Plato , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frede, Michael, 1992, “Plato’s Arguments and the Dialogue Form,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy , Supplementary Volume 1992, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 201–220.
Griswold, Charles L. (ed.), 1988, Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings , London: Routledge.
Guthrie, W.K.C., 1971, Socrates , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 1975, A History of Greek Philosophy , Volume 4, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 1978, A History of Greek Philosophy , Volume 5, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Irwin, Terence, 1995, Plato’s Ethics , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kahn, Charles H., 1996, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2003, “On Platonic Chronology,” in Julia Annas and Christopher Rowe (eds.), New Perspectives on Plato: Modern and Ancient , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, chapter 4.
Klagge, James C. and Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), 1992, Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogue , Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 1992, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kraut, Richard (ed.), 1992, The Cambridge Companion to Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2008, How to Read Plato , London: Granta.
Ledger, Gerald R., 1989, Re-Counting Plato: A Computer Analysis of Plato’s Style , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCabe, Mary Margaret, 1994, Plato’s Individuals , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
–––, 2000, Plato and His Predecessors: The Dramatisation of Reason , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meinwald, Constance, 2016, Plato , London: Routledge.
Morrison, Donald R., 2012, The Cambridge Companion to Socrates , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nails, Debra, 1995, Agora, Academy, and the Conduct of Philosophy , Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
–––, 2002, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics , Indianapolis: Hackett. (An encyclopedia of information about the characters in all of the dialogues.)
Nightingale, Andrea, 1993, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construction of Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peterson, Sandra, 2011, Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Press, Gerald A. (ed.), 2000, Who Speaks for Plato? Studies in Platonic Anonymity , Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Prior, William J., 2019, Socrates , Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rowe, C.J., 2007, Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rowe, Christopher, & Malcolm Schofield (eds.), 2000, Greek and Roman Political Thought , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Contains 7 introductory essays by 7 hands on Socratic and Platonic political thought.)
Rudebusch, George, 2009, Socrates , Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Russell, Daniel C., 2005, Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Rutherford, R.B., 1995, The Art of Plato: Ten Essays in Platonic Interpretation , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Santas, Gerasimos, 1979, Socrates: Philosophy in Plato’s Early Dialogues , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Sayre, Kenneth, 1995, Plato’s Literary Garden , Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Schofield, Malcolm, 2006, Plato: Political Philosophy , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Silverman, Allan, 2002, The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of Plato’s Metaphysics , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Smith, Nicholas D. and Thomas C. Brickhouse, 1994, Plato’s Socrates , Oxford: Oxford University Press
–––and John Bussanich (eds.), 2015, The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates , London: Bloomsbury.
Taylor, C.C.W., 1998, Socrates , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thesleff, Holger, 1982, Studies in Platonic Chronology , Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 70, Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica.
Vander Waerdt, Paul. A. (ed.), 1994, The Socratic Movement , Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Vasiliou, Iakovos, 2008, Aiming at Virtue in Plato , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vlastos, Gregory, 1991, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 1995, Studies in Greek Philosophy (Volume 2: Socrates, Plato, and Their Tradition), Daniel W. Graham (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
White, Nicholas P., 1976, Plato on Knowledge and Reality , Indianapolis: Hackett.
Young, Charles M., 1994, “Plato and Computer Dating,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy , 12: 227–250.
Zuckert, Catherine H., 2009, Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Reason and Necessity. Essays on Plato’s Timaeus

Guillaume dye . [email protected].

This collection of essays (hereafter RN) derives initially from a conference on Plato’s Timaeus and related works, held in Lampester in August 1998. Four of the papers given then (by Burgess, Campbell, Opsomer and Zedda) are incorporated in RN, with additional original contributions from Barker, Dean-Jones, Gill and Wright. Five papers deal directly with the Tim. (the principles of the mythical narrative, how the world soul and human body are formed, psychic illness, music), three focus on later developments (Aristotle’s theory of generation, the commentary of Proclus and evolutionary theory). Accordingly, RN is not an exhaustive commentary on the Tim. (the reader will probably not gain a synoptic view of the dialogue, even though Wright’s introduction (ix-xv) and an outline of topics in the Tim. (xvi) give some useful clues), but a succession of well-argued studies, each treating a precise topic. One should note the relative absence of references to the fiercest debates of the secondary literature: except one brief remark, 1 there is for example no mention of the place of the Tim. in the chronology of Plato’s dialogues. This has its good points and its bad: the reader is spared endless discussions, that can be quite unproductive, but some thoughtful studies are passed over in silence. 2 RN is nevertheless an excellent book, which often sheds a new light on the topics it addresses. It deserves therefore a careful reading.

In “Myth, Science and Reason in the Timaeus ” (1-22), M. R. Wright attempts to interpret the Tim. in the context of the traditional contrast between truth and myth and in Plato’s own treatment of myth in different dialogues. She explores the connections between myth, science and reason in Platonic theory, and their implications for the assessment of mathematical practices and scientific achievements. Her paper is very clear, often judicious, but not groundbreaking: it is rather a good synthesis on a complex and much treated topic.

After some remarks on Plato and myth as an educational tool (2-5), Wright asks the big question: “Why should Plato think that the study of natural science is a myth-making exercise, in which narrative is more appropriate than argument?” (5). A brief study of the epistemological status of Platonic myth (5-9) shows that “the areas in which hard philosophical argument is inappropriate and verification impossible include the origins of the human race, prehistory and what may happen to the soul after death” (9). In face of the description of the origins of universe, man and society, the philosopher and the poet are equally powerless (see for example Hesiod, Theog ., v. 115), so that Timaeus can only present a likely myth ( εἰκὼς μῦθος ) or a likely account ( εἰκὼς λόγος ). What remains striking is the association of a long, sophisticated account of the universe and its treatment as an entertaining story. Wright doesn’t mention the possibility that the dialogue could be ironic, but after some reminders of well-known things (for example the distinction between knowledge and opinion, or becoming and being) (12-14), she makes an interesting remark (15). She notices that εἰκών (“copy”, “image”) has the same root as the verbs εἰκάζω (“I guess”) and ἔοικε (“it resembles”, “it seems”), the participle εἰκώς (“suitable”) and its neuter plural with the article τὰ εἰκότα (“what is probable”), the abstract noun εἰκασία (“likeness, image”, but also “guessing” 3 ), and the related adverb εἰκῇ (“at random”). According to Wright, it is because of these shifting meanings that we arrive at the apparently surprising conclusion that an account of something has the same epistemological status as its object. Whereas accounts of paradigms can be made irrefutable, “accounts of copies and likenesses are probable at best, for, as being is to becoming, so truth is to convincing guesswork” (15) (cf. Tim. 29c-d).

In his highly interesting essay “How to build a world soul—a practical guide” (23-41), Sergio Zedda tackles the difficult passages describing the construction of the world soul ( Tim. , 34a-40d). He explores “some of the issues arising from the practical actions of blending the ingredients of which the world soul is made, and then of working with the resulting mixture”, and focuses “on the practical difficulties involved in describing at the same time a process of cosmogonic generation and the act of building a physical representation of it” (23).

In the passages dealing with the constructions of the world soul (35a1-36d9) and the human soul (41d5), Plato describes the activities of the demiurge by means of a language analogous to that of an ordinary craftsman involved in the making of an object. The most obvious references are to the craft of metalworking (35a1-b4: συνεκεράσατο, ξυναρμόττον, δύσμεικτον, μιγνύς, διένειμεν ; 41d4-7: κρατήρ, κατεχεῖτο ). Zedda, rightly to my mind, takes Plato at his word: Plato doesn’t describe an abstract operation and doesn’t simply use the language of the craftsmen. Rather, he describes “the actual, practical series of operations needed in order to construct a model, or representation, of the world soul” (25). Zedda then accounts for the complexities of the construction (blending, hammering, marking according to harmonic proportions, and so on) according to Greek mathematical and metallurgical techniques (26-33).

However, Plato’s text is complex. Plato provides an account of a series of practical operations leading to the construction of a visible and tangible object, but he also guides the reader through the abstract steps used by a geometer to describe the subdivision of a regular plane figure. There is thus a tension throughout his description between the purely abstract actions (like the subdivision of the strip into its intervals), and those which are part of the building process. This leads to some inconsistencies (for example between 36b6-7 and 41d4-7).

Zedda takes this tension seriously and emphasizes the differences between the two levels of thought (33-37). He notices that although Plato seems sometimes unaware of this tension, he obviously “makes full use of some of the epistemic possibilities opened by forcing the reader to employ at the same time theoretical descriptions and visual representations of objects” (37). The description provided by Plato (in fact, that of an armillary sphere 4 ) wavers indeed between a physical object and an abstract model of the cosmos, and Plato has good reasons to do so. At 40c-d, Timaeus tells us that one should not attempt to understand the movements of the planets without a visible model of the universe: a visible representation of the real object is indeed necessary to get some stable information on that object. Zedda can thus account for the tension, unavoidable in a text describing an object of becoming, between the two levels of description: the armillary sphere, which is a visible and tangible representation of the world soul, acts as an intermediate term between objects of becoming and the model that the demiurge has in mind as his inspiration. More precisely, it “must be seen as standing in an analogical relationship both with its model, the world soul, and with the image of the world soul constructed in the mind of the person trying to understand its workings” (38).

Scott Burgess’ essay (“How to build a human body: an idealist’s guide” (43-58)) aims at giving Plato’s biology an integral place in the cosmic system presented in the Tim. (45, 54). He sheds light on the role and function of the sinews within the body, showing their relevance to the main theories of cosmic harmony and the relation of microcosm to macrocosm in the myth of creation (45). He first makes a good synopsis (45-47) of the wide use of νεῦρον (sinew, tendon, nerve, vein, cord, bow-string, string of a lyre, etc.), according to which the neuron is a “tensioned” substance which is both harmonious and the cause of harmony between the bodily opposites of bone and flesh and may also be destroyed by extreme conditions (47). This account, deepened by some remarks on the Phaedo as well as on Homeric and Hippocratic sources, can then usefully be applied to the Tim. . The neura maintain a balance between the natural tendencies of bone and flesh (if this were not the case, the body would be reduced to a rigid board or a shapeless mass) and thus may be compared to the place occupied by the soul in harmonic theory (48). The world soul is the first image of a blended form, whereas the human soul, which may be viewed as a middle term that links the world soul to the human body, is the second, and the human body, which owes its cohesion and movement to the sinews, is the third (54).

In a series of recent studies, Christopher Gill has attempted to study the dialogue form in Plato and the Galenic and Stoic readings of the Tim. . 5 His paper “The body’s fault? Plato’s Timaeus on psychic illness” (59-84) belongs to this line of inquiry. Its first part is a subtle methodological reflection on the interpretation of Plato (59-65), while the second and the third parts discuss respectively Galenic (65-70) and Stoic (70-77) considerations linked to Tim. 86a-90d. The three parts are related to each other: the reflections of Galen and the Stoics on the Tim. are used as a basis for making the best sense of the Platonic text, understood in accordance with precise methodological considerations.

At Tim. 86b-87b, Plato makes two puzzling claims: psychic illness (which includes moral and mental failings) is the outcome of bodily defectiveness, and people should not be held responsible for these failings. Plato also develops the idea that psychic therapy should focus on the relationship between the body and the psyche (87c-90d). Problems begin with the first sentence: καὶ τὰ μὲν περὶ τὸ σῶμα νοσήματα ταύτῃ συμβαίνει γιγνόμενα, τὰ δὲ περὶ ψυχὴν διὰ σώματος ἕξιν τῇδε . As Gill notices, the latter part of the sentence might mean “diseases of the psyche arise because of the condition of the body in the following way” (a strong reading: all diseases of the psyche derive from bodily causes), or “the diseases of the psyche that arise from a bodily condition come about in the following way” (a weak reading: some psychic diseases arise this way) (60). The words allow either reading, but Gill argues convincingly for the strong one (60-61). This leads to another problem: although the idea that “no one does wrong willingly” is a recurrent Platonic theme, it is generally not linked with the idea of a bodily basis of the agent’s responsibility. This apparently runs counter to other Platonic considerations (at least in the Protagoras , the Gorgias , the Republic and the Phaedo ). Following M. M. Mackenzie, 6 Gill shows that one should underline the unusual character of the claim that moral and intellectual failings derive from the body and connect this claim with an authentic Platonic line of thought, namely “the idea that when people do wrong it reflects a type of psychological defectiveness which those concerned do not fully understand” (63).

Gill and Mackenzie seem to me completely right when they emphasize the importance of following through the full force of a line of argument in a specific dialogue. It is true that there is here an apparent contrast with other Platonic ideas, but one should take seriously the literary genre of the dialogue, and note, as does Gill (63), that the line of thought conveyed in the Tim. is not without parallels in other dialogues: Plato develops throughout his work the idea that wrongdoing follows from the inability to grasp what virtue and vice are, and does not consider blame a good response to wrongdoing. What is distinctive in Tim. 86a-90d is its explicit character and the bodily basis of wrongdoing. According to Gill, this last idea can be illuminated by reference to the ancient reception of the dialogue, namely in Galen and the Stoics.

This is not the place here to deal extensively with Gill’s rigorous and precise exegesis. Accordingly, I will say only a few words on the other two parts of the paper. First (65-70), Gill shows how Galen uses Tim 86b-87b to support his view of the body-psyche relationship. He then asks how far Galen’s reading can explain 86b-87b. The idea, especially developed in Galen’s That the capacities of the psyche depend on the mixtures of the body , that we are fundamentally bodies, can explain why psychic illness derives directly from bodily defect. But Gill thinks that the Stoics can be more useful. The section “Health as structure: Plato and Stoicism” (70-76) associates, but does not identify, Tim. 86a-90d with the Stoic approach (76-77). There is no evidence that the Stoics paid special attention to this passage (65), but the affinities between Plato and Stoicism are remarkable: the ideas that we are “combinations” of psyche and body, that we can and should be well proportioned structures of psyche and body, that psychic illness is a disruption of the harmonious structure of the body and may also derive from our failure to deploy the good kind of psychophysical therapy, all figure prominently in the Tim. and Stoicism.

As Andrew Barker notices, “there is no single, full-scale discussion of sound and hearing in the Timaeus ” (85)—but that doesn’t mean there is nothing to say on the subject. In his remarkable essay “Timaeus on music and the liver” (85-99), he considers the processes by which music impinges upon the soul, the way the soul apprehends it, and he identifies the transactions through which music can be therapeutic and help to promote the return of our psychic “revolutions” to their proper order (86). An inquiry about what happens in the soul and the body of someone who listens to music thus ranges over a vast array of questions: the physics of sound, the psychology and physiology of perception, the roles of rational and non-rational parts of the soul in the reception of music.

It is impossible to go here into the details of Barker’s dense discussion, which is both a painstaking analysis of the passages of the Tim. related to sound and hearing 7 and credible and skillful speculation where necessary. The phenomenon of hearing a sound starts with a movement in the air, which causes an impulse to enter the ear and makes an impact on the reasoning part of the soul, which is situated in the head. Nothing will count as a sound until it has thus entered the body. Sound itself is the impact made on the brain, the blood and the reasoning part of the soul (86-87). Hearing occurs when this impact is transmitted to the lower part of the soul, concerned with perception, which is located in the liver (87). It seems that the liver “translates” the movements which constitute hearing into patterns of concordant and discordant sounds. These patterns are then reflected on the liver’s surface as images and returned to the reasoning part of the soul: the liver receives thoughts as τύποι and emits them again as εἴδωλα (93-95). Music can thus be interpreted within the framework of the divine harmonics of the world soul, and the human soul can thus improve its imitations of the cosmic order (95-97). Barker notes also that perception and reason are more closely tied in the Tim. than generally thought: while later Greek commentators, criticizing exponents of “Pythagorean” harmonics who claim to ground their analysis on reason alone and do not rely on perception, assert that harmonic investigation must begin with sensation, 8 Plato thought that musical perception embraces not only the recognition of pitch-relations as concordant or discordant, musical or unmusical, but also encompasses a large and impressionistic realm of imagery and emotional response. Consequently, the intelligent listener must interpret these phantasmata as well as the perceived qualities of objective acoustic relationships (97-98).

The last three papers do not directly deal with the Tim. , but study some aspects of its reception. Lesley Dean-Jones’ contribution (“Aristotle’s understanding of Plato’s Receptacle and its significance for Aristotle’s theory of familial resemblance” (101-12)) tackles a problem she had already discussed in her Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), namely Aristotle’s theory of familial resemblance. In her short but vigorous paper, she shows how the Tim. can illuminate the conundrum of how, according to Aristotle, a child might resemble its mother (101).

It has sometimes been noticed that Aristotle thought that the Receptacle of the Tim. shared many important characteristics of its prime matter. 9 One should also note that Plato uses a biological simile of parents and offspring when he explains the role of the Receptacle and the Forms in producing the world (50d). It is then tempting to use this simile and the discussion of sexual reproduction (91c-d) to shed light on Aristotle’s theory of reproduction: “Plato’s description of how the Receptacle functions must, for Aristotle, connect with the Role matter plays in the creation of new entities in the world” (101). Consequently, Dean-Jones sets out the role of the Receptacle in the production of particulars, showing why and how, according to Aristotle, it calls for refinement (102-06).

A brief reminder on Aristotle’s theory of reproduction may be useful. According to Aristotle, the semen of the male is concocted to a point at which it is able to carry the “movements” of the father’s form into the female matter, where it first sets the general form of an animal, and then of the species. If the semen carries enough heat, the species form will take on the “movements” of the male sex, so that the body will develop in such a way as to be able to concoct semen. But if the semen is not so hot, or if there is a large amount of matter to be informed, the species form will be of the female sex: the body will be able to concoct the seminal residue only to the point of potentiality for the species form, but won’t be able to pass the species form into its seminal residue. As things do not change randomly, but into their opposites (the “movements” of the male change into the “movements” of the female), it is a female, and not a male, which is then produced. The same reasoning applies to the movements which individuate particular animals with respect to eye color, nose shape, body type and the like: if the father’s individual movements are not strong enough, they will revert to their opposite, namely the individual movements of the mother (107).

At first sight, this seems a rather mysterious account of the resemblance of children to their mothers. However, some scholars have tried to make good sense of this theory. Dean-Jones criticizes some previous attempts, including her former treatment of the subject (107-09), 10 and expounds her new solution (109-110), which I sketch briefly here. We should keep in mind Aristotle’s basic approval of the functioning of the Receptacle and the role Plato assigned to it in his simile of sexual reproduction and should see the mother’s form, like the father’s, outside the body, in the same way as the truly existing things are outside the Receptacle. The mother’s form is in her body, but it cannot shape the menses until they have been concocted by the male heat contained in the semen. Once the menses have been informed and can take on the species and sex movements, the individual movements of the mother and father can try to set their impress on the offspring. According to Aristotle, it is possible for a form in a body to work directly on the female seminal residue without the intermediary tool of semen ( GA I, 22, 730b25-32). Aristotle emphasizes that a female’s contribution to conception is purely material, but this does not prevent him from giving her individual form a role, provided it remains outside of the seminal residue in her womb (110).

Procession and timeless production in Proclus are not subjects unknown to scholars, but there is no complete study of demiurgy as such and of the problem of making the causal transition from the unmoved One to the perpetual motion of the physical world. In his “Proclus on demiurgy and Procession: a Neoplatonic reading of the Timaeus ” (113-43), Jan Opsomer sets out the elements of a promising inquiry into Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus . Opsomer skillfully clarifies this obscure topic, showing how Proclus wanted to overcome the dichotomy and soften the transition from what is immortal and immobile to the sensible world. It is essential for Proclus to reconcile the productive activity of the demiurge with the Neoplatonic notion of procession, according to which all reality emanates from a supreme principle, the One. Proclus has therefore multiplied the levels of demiurgy by inserting a number of intermediary stages (129), but Opsomer rightly notices that this solution, coupled with proposition 76 of the Elements of Theology (“all that arises from an unmoved cause has an invariable existence, and all that arises from a mobile cause, a variable”), is unsatisfactory (130). Put in a nutshell, the objection is the following: the insertion of intermediaries solves the problem provided we take proposition 76 as implying that it is the same property that is at each stage transmitted from cause to effect, but in that case, each effect would have to be immobile (immortal, eternal) in the same sense as its cause. Of course, Proclus has an answer: a cause transcends its effects and is superior to it (propositions 7 and 75), but he explains neither the exact nature of the transition nor the way a property (immobility, immortality, eternity) can become its contrary. The paper contains also a very useful appendix (“Demiurgy in the Proclean Pantheon” (131-32)) and seems to me a very good way to make the essentials of Proclus’ philosophy available to a non-specialist in Neoplatonism.

Gordon Campbell’s paper “Zoogony and Evolution in Plato’s Timaeus : The Presocratics, Lucretius and Darwin” (145-80) explores the Timaeus in the context of theories of zoogony and evolution, from the Presocratics to Darwin and Lamarck. Campbell’s approach is informed by his conviction that ancient ideas should be studied not only as exhibits in a museum of wrong ideas but as living and valuable contributions to a debate still alive today: one may reach a better understanding of ancient and modern ideas if we understand the source of our preconceptions (146). Accordingly, Campbell places the Tim. in an apparently anachronistic context—the Tim. arguing against Lucretius, Darwin and Lamarck interacting with Lucretius and Plato. This method seems perhaps paradoxical, but it is in the end quite sensible: the Tim. can be seen as a reply to the anti-teleological cosmologies of Empedocles and Democritus, which will later influence Lucretius, but Epicureanism is also a reply to the Tim. , and our own ideas are so much influenced by Darwin that our approach to ancient texts should take its contribution into account (145-46).

Campbell centers on the mechanisms of the origin of species. He distinguishes between “inter-specific evolution” (the Darwinian model of the origin of species) and “intra-specific evolution” (the accumulation of variation within a species) and argues that whereas the latter is standard in ancient thinking, the former is not found there, except in the Tim. (146).

Campbell studies Lucretius’, Empedocles’ and other Presocratic zoogonies (146-54), and sketches the main lines of the topic of human evolution in Lucretius, Lamarck and Darwin (154-58). This judicious comparative work leads him to the Tim. . In the section “Zoogony and evolution in Plato’s Timaeus ” (158-62), he shows how Plato appropriates Presocratic physical ideas, and then subverts them. Campbell gives four examples: the order of creation in the Tim. is unusual (the human created before the animals), animal species are formed by an inter-species evolutionary process of mutation from one to another (this idea is pursued further in the following section, “Metamorphosis and metempsychosis” (163-64)), there are no extinctions of species, and there is no spontaneous generation of life from the earth (158).

Campbell draws also a striking parallel between Plato and Virgil (164): just as Virgil remythologizes the cosmology and aetiology that Lucretius had previously demythologized, Plato remythologizes the cosmology previously appropriated from myth by the Presocratics. It is obviously not a return to before the Presocratics: this process of “remythologization” is rather one aspect of Plato’s outstanding style.

In sum, this short volume, sometimes difficult but often rewarding, will be a very useful reading for everyone seriously interested in Plato’s philosophy and its influence.

pp. 56, n. 19, Metraux 1995, 10 should be read for Metraux 1999, 10 pp. 57, n. 22, a quotation from C. Joubaud, Le corps humain dans la philosophie platonicienne , Paris, Vrin, 1991, pp. 59: fonctionnement should be read for fonctionnment, and fonctionnant for fonctionant.

1 . By Wright, pp. 20, n. 28.

2 . For example Pierre Hadot, “Physique et poésie dans le Timée de Platon”, Revue de théologie et de philosophie 115, 1983, pp. 113-33; Rémi Brague, “The Body of the Speech. A New Hypothesis on the Compositional Structure of Timaeus’ Monologue”, in D. O’Meara (ed.), Platonic Investigations , Washington, D. C., The Catholic University of America Press, 1985, pp. 53-83; Mischa von Perger, Die Allseele in Platons Timaios , Stuttgart, Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1997 (Opsomer seems to be the only author to take this book into account (134, n. 17)).

3 . Cf. Rep. 511d. The term can also mean “conjecture”.

4 . According to Zedda, it is highly probable that Plato had in front of him, as he was writing this passage, a real armillary sphere (35).

5 . “Afterword: dialectic and the dialogue form in late Plato”, in Gill and McCabe, Form and Argument in Late Plato , 1996, pp. 283-311; “Galen versus Chrysippus on the tripartite psyche in Timaeus 69-72, in Calvo and Brisson, Interpreting the Timaeus-Critias, 1997, pp. 267-73; “Did Galen understand Platonic and Stoic thinking on emotions?”, in Sihvola and Engberg-Pedersen, The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy , 1998, pp. 113-48.

6 . Cf. M. M. Mackenzie (now McCabe), Plato on Punishment , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

7 . Cf. for example his remarks on συμφωνία and ἀναρμοσττία (90-92).

8 . See the comments on Ptolemy of Cyrene and Didymus by Porphyry in his Commentary on the Harmonics of Claudius Ptolemaeus (25.10-14, 26.15-25).

9 . Cf. Claghorn, Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’s Timaeus, The Hague, 1954, pp. 5-19.

10 . D. Balme, “Aristotle Historia Animalium Book Ten”, in J. Wiesner (ed.), Aristoteles und seine Schule , Berlin, 1985, pp. 191-206; John Cooper, “Metaphysics in Aristotle’s embryology”, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society , 214, 1988, pp. 14-41; L. Dean-Jones, op. cit. , pp. 196.

11 . 165 pages without the introduction, indices, contents, the bibliography of each contribution and a bibliography of main editions, commentaries and translations (181).

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Essays on Plato’s Epistemology

In this Book

Franco Trabattoni
Published by: Leuven University Press

An Innovating approach to Plato’s philosophy. Through a careful survey of several significant Platonic texts, mainly focussing on the nature of knowledge, Essays on Plato’s Epistemology offers the reader a fresh and promising approach to Plato’s philosophy as a whole. From the very earliest reception of Plato’s philosophy, there has been a conflict between a dogmatic and a sceptical interpretation of his work and thought. Moreover, the two sides are often associated, respectively, with a metaphysical and an anti-metaphysical approach. This book, continuing a line of thought that is nowadays strongly present in the secondary literature – and also followed by the author in over thirty years of research –, maintains that a third way of thinking is required. Against the widespread view that an anti-dogmatic philosophy must go together with an anti-metaphysical stance, Trabattoni shows that for Plato, on the contrary, a sober and reasonable assessment of both the powers and limits of human reason relies on a proper metaphysical outlook. Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Frontmatter

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
pp. vii-viii
‎Introduction
pp. ix-xxvi
‎1. Thought as Inner Dialogue (Theaet. 189e4-190a6)
2. Logos and Doxa : The Meaning of the Refutation of the Third Definition of Epistêmê in the Theaetetus
‎3. Theaetetus 200d–201c: Truth without Certainty
‎4. Foundationalism or Coherentism? On the Third Definition of Epistêmê in the Theaetetus
‎5. What is the Meaning of Plato’s Theaetetus ? Some Remarks on a New Annotated Translation of the Dialogue
6. David Sedley’s Theaetetus
‎7. The “Virtuous Circle” of Language: On the Meaning of Plato’s Cratylus
pp. 111-138
8. The Knowledge of the Philosopher
pp. 139-166
‎9. What Role Do the Mathematical Sciences Play in the Metaphor of the Line?
pp. 167-188
‎10. Socrates’ Error in the Parmenides
pp. 189-198
‎11. On the Distinguishing Features of Plato’s “Metaphysics” (Starting from the Parmenides)
pp. 199-218
‎12. Is There Such a Thing as a “Platonic Theory of the Ideas” According to Aristotle?
pp. 219-240
‎13. The Unity of Virtue, Self-Predication and the “Third Man” in Protagoras 329e–332a
pp. 241-264
14. Plato: Philosophy, Politics and Knowledge: An Overview
pp. 265-288
‎Bibliography
pp. 289-300
pp. 301-310

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Plato on Knowledge and Forms: Selected Essays

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Plato on Knowledge and Forms brings together a set of connected essays by Gail Fine, in her main area of research since the late 1970s: Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology. She discusses central issues in Plato’s metaphysics and epistemology, issues concerning the nature and extent of knowledge, and its relation to perception, sensibles, and forms; and issues concerning the nature of forms, such as whether they are universals or particulars, separate or immanent, and whether they are causes. A specially written introduction draws together the themes of the volume, which will reward the attention of anyone interested in Plato or in ancient metaphysics and epistemology.

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Essay about Plato

Plato was a philosopher and educator in ancient Greece. He was one of the most important thinkers and writers in the history of Western culture. Plato was born in Athens into a family that was one of the oldest and most distinguished in the city. His father Ariston died when Plato was only a child. The name Plato was a nickname meaning broad shoulders. Plato's real name was Aristocles. Plato had aspirations of becoming a politician, however these hopes were destroyed when his friend Socrates was sentenced to death in 299 B.C. Extremely hurt Plato left Athens and traveled for several years. In 387 B.C., Plato returned to Athens and founded a school of philosophy and science that became known as the Academy. Topics such as astronomy, …show more content…

Plato was interested in how we can apply a single word or concept to many words or things. For example how can the word house be used for all the individual dwellings that are houses? Plato answered that various things can be called by the same name because they have something in common. He called this common factor the thing’s form or idea. Plato insisted that the forms differ greatly from the ordinary things that we see around us. Ordinary things change but their forms do not. A particular triangle may be altered in size or shape but the form of a triangle can never change. Plato concluded that forms exist neither in space or time. They can be known not only by the intellect but also by the senses. Because of their stability and perfection, the forms have greater reality than ordinary objects observed by the senses. Thus true knowledge is knowledge of the forms. In his most well known work, The Republic, Plato states that in his view, only in a good society can the good life be achieved. The Republic outlines Plato’s idea of a perfect or utopian society. He also identifies the four cardinal virtues that are required for a good society. These cardinal virtues are temperance or self-control, courage, wisdom, and justice. Without these virtues he believed that the good life could not be obtained. In The Republic Plato also discusses two different forms of

Essay on Plato and the Forms

     Plato’s notion of the Forms vs. the physical realm is quite and interesting topic. I believe something very similar to what Plato thinks about the Forms and our physical reality. Plato says that there is nothing that is perfect in this reality that we live in. And the Forms are the perfect ideals or thoughts that we are striving to achieve throughout our lives. Plato says it is impossible to reach the Forms in our current reality and that it is only possible to achieve perfect knowledge and truth after our soul leaves our body and goes to the next realm where we can become or attain the Forms.

Plato’s Influence on Western Civilization Essay

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Following events, which went on to take place further, established his dislike for the government form, thus resulting his propositions of a Utopia in The Republic. At a young age, Plato began to follow the great philosopher Socrates, which instilled his ultimate desire to pursue philosophy, rather than his destined profession in politics. Plato had grown close to Socrates and his teachings; this close connection was a cause to Plato’s finalizing opinions of Democracy. In 399 BCE Socrates was executed by the newly leading Democratic leaders of Athens, and was voted by a majority to be put to death. Plato turned in disgust from contemporary Athenian politics afterwards and went on to be the founder of the Academy; a gathering place, which one could consider a school, that housed great scholars and their revolutionizing thoughts on Mathematics, Philosophy, and Theoretical Astronomy. Due to the events of Plato’s life, he was able to develop the most profound and employed ideas associated with western civilization. His influence had such great impact that his principles are often used in modern-day establishments, from government forms, to fundamentals pertaining to philosophy, the impacts of socialization, as well as religion. To begin an analysis of principles, there must be an understanding of human nature and his personal thoughts regarding the topic, in having that basis of knowledge one could further understand how the basic

Platos Repulic, book V Essay

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ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the viability of certain aspects (the sex lottery) of Plato's Republic, book V. It is college level 'A' paper.

Essay about Plato’s Apology

Socrates was a very simple man who did not have many material possessions and spoke in a plain, conversational manner. Acknowledging his own ignorance, he engaged in conversations with people claiming to be experts, usually in ethical matters. By asking simple questions, Socrates gradually revealed that these people were in fact very confused and did not actually know anything about the matters about which they claimed to be an expert. Socrates felt that the quest for wisdom and the instruction of others through dialogue and inquiry were the highest aims in life. He felt that "The unexamined life is not worth living." Plato's Apology is the speech Socrates made at his trial. Socrates was charged with not recognizing the

Platos Republic Essay

Plato's Republic      Critics of The Republic, Plato's contribution to the history of political theory, have formed two distinct opinions on the reasoning behind the work. The first group believes that The Republic is truly a model for a political society, while the other strongly objects to that, stating it as being far too fantastic for any society to operate successfully by these suggested methods. In an exchange between Crito and Dionysius, this argument is first introduced, with Crito siding with those who agree that The Republic is a realistic political model, and Dionysius arguing on behalf of those who doubt it as being realistic, claiming it to be a criticism of politics in general.

Analyzing Plato's The Five Dialogues

The patterns and concepts in this perfect world seize to change. To grasp his idea of Form take a soccer ball as an example. The soccer ball has some obvious qualities; color, shape, and weight. While size and weight seize to exist if the soccer ball doesn’t exist the shape remains. If you separate the property of “roundness” from the size or weight of the ball then you have the Form of roundness alone. Forms can hold true for other objects, all other round objects share the same outline as the Form, “roundness.” To differentiate Form and objects, realize that a Form does not exist alone in space or time while a tangible object does. By this Plato means that form exists in a different way than the object, which is how it can withstand from changing. The property of roundness is universal, it can be recognized everywhere or nowhere and the Form will continue to exist. If all round objects were destroyed the property of roundness stays constant. Forms exist independently while particulars can only exist through participating in the Forms. In the Meno Plato writes, “ For as all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things, there is no reason why we should not, by remembering but one single thing—an act which men call learning—discover everything else.” (Meno 81d) We as human beings are able to recognize the Forms because we were born with a dim recollection of them

Plato's Divided Line

Plato’s Forms and The Divided Line Forms come from the Greek word (eidos), which is translated, to an idea. Plato argued that even though an idea exists in our mind a form is independent of our mind. Forms are not made of or dependent upon physical matter unlike Particulars, which are, changeable and imperfect. Plato saw Forms as the source of all knowledge and as such, the Forms must be eternally consistent and unchanging.

Overview Of Plato And Plato's Theory Of The Four Forms

The ambiguity of the concept of the forms in Plato's Theory of Forms lessens the strength of Plato's overall argument. Plato uses the concept of the forms as the basis of many of his

Plato's Academy Research Paper

Plato created an academy dedicated to geometry. He had a bunch of successful scholars that attended his school. Some scholars stayed for plato, but others left to alexandria to further their studies. Plato’s academy was dedicated to geometry, and it was extremely important then, and it is even important

Plato's Republic Essay

“the having and doing of one’s own and what belongs to one would be agreed to

Aristotle Research Paper

It is said within his twenty years, he eventually started teaching himself within Plato’s school, and was well known for rhetoric at the time. During his teachings it became known that Aristotle did not view the world the same as Plato. It was this that would start to stir the mind within Aristotle to challenge Plato’s view that spawned still known debates today that rage. Plato’s eventual death and later his subsequent denial of advancement to the head of Plato’s school that another was chosen in his stead so he left once his friend Hermeias gave him a better

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In reading the Republic, there is no reason to search for arguments which show that Platonic justice ('inner justice' or 'psychic harmony') entails ordinary justice. The relationship between inner justice and ordinary justice is of no importance in Plato's Republic. We note that Plato tries to argue from the very first book that the true source of normativity lies in knowledge attained by philosophical reason. What is crucial, then, is the relationship between inner justice and acts which brings about a just polis.

Platos Forms Essay examples

     I intend to show the validity of Plato's arguments about his theory of Forms. Aristotle, along with others, cross-examines Plato's proposals. Yet, I happen to see the potential of his point of view and would like to take a deeper look into his theory. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze the theory of Plato's Forms from his perspective and that of several others, including Aristotle.

Plato 's Theory Of Forms Essay

This is the center thought behind Plato 's theory of forms, from this thought he moves towards clarifying his universe of forms or ideas. While trying to give the definition to elusive universals, Plato constructs a Theory of Forms to demonstrate that the sensible universe of particulars are simple impersonations of this present reality where forms live, autonomous of thought and existing in their own metaphysical realm that can be retrieved through the mind using reason.

Plato Was A Great Philosopher

Plato was a great Greek philosopher that was born 428 B.C.E. in Classical Athens to Ariston and Perictione and died in 348 B.C.E. He is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of all time of western thought. He was the apprentice of Socrates and went on to mentor a student at his school, Aristotle. He had many great accomplishments such as writing the apology and the republic to even opening The Academy.

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The Supreme Court Got It Wrong: Abortion Is Not Settled Law

In an black-and-white photo illustration, nine abortion pills are arranged on a grid.

By Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw

Ms. Murray is a law professor at New York University. Ms. Shaw is a contributing Opinion writer.

In his majority opinion in the case overturning Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito insisted that the high court was finally settling the vexed abortion debate by returning the “authority to regulate abortion” to the “people and their elected representatives.”

Despite these assurances, less than two years after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortion is back at the Supreme Court. In the next month, the justices will hear arguments in two high-stakes cases that may shape the future of access to medication abortion and to lifesaving care for pregnancy emergencies. These cases make clear that Dobbs did not settle the question of abortion in America — instead, it generated a new slate of questions. One of those questions involves the interaction of existing legal rules with the concept of fetal personhood — the view, held by many in the anti-abortion movement, that a fetus is a person entitled to the same rights and protections as any other person.

The first case , scheduled for argument on Tuesday, F.D.A. v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, is a challenge to the Food and Drug Administration’s protocols for approving and regulating mifepristone, one of the two drugs used for medication abortions. An anti-abortion physicians’ group argues that the F.D.A. acted unlawfully when it relaxed existing restrictions on the use and distribution of mifepristone in 2016 and 2021. In 2016, the agency implemented changes that allowed the use of mifepristone up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, rather than seven; reduced the number of required in-person visits for dispensing the drug from three to one; and allowed the drug to be prescribed by individuals like nurse practitioners. In 2021, it eliminated the in-person visit requirement, clearing the way for the drug to be dispensed by mail. The physicians’ group has urged the court to throw out those regulations and reinstate the previous, more restrictive regulations surrounding the drug — a ruling that could affect access to the drug in every state, regardless of the state’s abortion politics.

The second case, scheduled for argument on April 24, involves the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (known by doctors and health policymakers as EMTALA ), which requires federally funded hospitals to provide patients, including pregnant patients, with stabilizing care or transfer to a hospital that can provide such care. At issue is the law’s interaction with state laws that severely restrict abortion, like an Idaho law that bans abortion except in cases of rape or incest and circumstances where abortion is “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.”

Although the Idaho law limits the provision of abortion care to circumstances where death is imminent, the federal government argues that under EMTALA and basic principles of federal supremacy, pregnant patients experiencing emergencies at federally funded hospitals in Idaho are entitled to abortion care, even if they are not in danger of imminent death.

These cases may be framed in the technical jargon of administrative law and federal pre-emption doctrine, but both cases involve incredibly high-stakes issues for the lives and health of pregnant persons — and offer the court an opportunity to shape the landscape of abortion access in the post-Roe era.

These two cases may also give the court a chance to seed new ground for fetal personhood. Woven throughout both cases are arguments that gesture toward the view that a fetus is a person.

If that is the case, the legal rules that would typically hold sway in these cases might not apply. If these questions must account for the rights and entitlements of the fetus, the entire calculus is upended.

In this new scenario, the issue is not simply whether EMTALA’s protections for pregnant patients pre-empt Idaho’s abortion ban, but rather which set of interests — the patient’s or the fetus’s — should be prioritized in the contest between state and federal law. Likewise, the analysis of F.D.A. regulatory protocols is entirely different if one of the arguments is that the drug to be regulated may be used to end a life.

Neither case presents the justices with a clear opportunity to endorse the notion of fetal personhood — but such claims are lurking beneath the surface. The Idaho abortion ban is called the Defense of Life Act, and in its first bill introduced in 2024, the Idaho Legislature proposed replacing the term “fetus” with “preborn child” in existing Idaho law. In its briefs before the court, Idaho continues to beat the drum of fetal personhood, insisting that EMTALA protects the unborn — rather than pregnant women who need abortions during health emergencies.

According to the state, nothing in EMTALA imposes an obligation to provide stabilizing abortion care for pregnant women. Rather, the law “actually requires stabilizing treatment for the unborn children of pregnant women.” In the mifepristone case, advocates referred to fetuses as “unborn children,” while the district judge in Texas who invalidated F.D.A. approval of the drug described it as one that “starves the unborn human until death.”

Fetal personhood language is in ascent throughout the country. In a recent decision , the Alabama Supreme Court allowed a wrongful-death suit for the destruction of frozen embryos intended for in vitro fertilization, or I.V.F. — embryos that the court characterized as “extrauterine children.”

Less discussed but as worrisome is a recent oral argument at the Florida Supreme Court concerning a proposed ballot initiative intended to enshrine a right to reproductive freedom in the state’s Constitution. In considering the proposed initiative, the chief justice of the state Supreme Court repeatedly peppered Nathan Forrester, the senior deputy solicitor general who was representing the state, with questions about whether the state recognized the fetus as a person under the Florida Constitution. The point was plain: If the fetus was a person, then the proposed ballot initiative, and its protections for reproductive rights, would change the fetus’s rights under the law, raising constitutional questions.

As these cases make clear, the drive toward fetal personhood goes beyond simply recasting abortion as homicide. If the fetus is a person, any act that involves reproduction may implicate fetal rights. Fetal personhood thus has strong potential to raise questions about access to abortion, contraception and various forms of assisted reproductive technology, including I.V.F.

In response to the shifting landscape of reproductive rights, President Biden has pledged to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.” Roe and its successor, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, were far from perfect; they afforded states significant leeway to impose onerous restrictions on abortion, making meaningful access an empty promise for many women and families of limited means. But the two decisions reflected a constitutional vision that, at least in theory, protected the liberty to make certain intimate choices — including choices surrounding if, when and how to become a parent.

Under the logic of Roe and Casey, the enforceability of EMTALA, the F.D.A.’s power to regulate mifepristone and access to I.V.F. weren’t in question. But in the post-Dobbs landscape, all bets are off. We no longer live in a world in which a shared conception of constitutional liberty makes a ban on I.V.F. or certain forms of contraception beyond the pale.

Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University and a host of the Supreme Court podcast “ Strict Scrutiny ,” is a co-author of “ The Trump Indictments : The Historic Charging Documents With Commentary.”

Kate Shaw is a contributing Opinion writer, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and a host of the Supreme Court podcast “Strict Scrutiny.” She served as a law clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens and Judge Richard Posner.

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Amy Ettinger, who inspired readers with her life-affirming essays on dying, succumbs to cancer at 49

( JTA ) — Amy Ettinger, an author and creative writing instructor who chronicled the last months of her life in articles for the Washington Post , died March 20 from cancer at her home in Santa Cruz, California. She was 49.

Ettinger’s essays focused on the things she was able to do and cherish despite her diagnosis with a rare, incurable cancer called leiomyosarcoma : seeing a live performance of “Mamma Mia!” with her 14-year-old daughter, Julianna; eating her favorite pastry from a San Francisco bakery.

“ I’ve learned that life is all about a series of moments, and I plan to spend as much remaining time as I can savoring each one, surrounded by the beauty of nature and my family and friends,”she wrote.

Ettinger was an occasional contributor to Kveller, the Jewish family website that is a Jewish Telegraphic Agency partner. There she wrote about her mother’s kugel recipe (“light brown on its crispy top, and the color of milky coffee in the middle”) , and how she, as a “non-observant Jew,” marked Yom Kippur — which in 2013 happened to fall on her 10th wedding anniversary .

“Like Yom Kippur, a wedding anniversary is a time to take a step back from your daily life — to weigh the good and bad, to contemplate your triumphs and missteps, to make a vow to do better individually and as a couple,” she wrote.

Ettinger was born in Rochester, New York, and grew up in Cupertino, California. She discovered her calling as a journalist in high school. She majored in American literature at UC Santa Cruz and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in 1999.

Her writing appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, Salon, CNN and Newsweek. In a 2021 article for AARP, she wrote how her mother’s death inspired her to learn Sheila Ettinger’s favorite game: mahjong. She taught writing classes at Stanford Continuing Studies.

In 2017, Penguin Random House published her memoir-cum-travelogue “Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America.” In it she wrote how she keeps “between fifteen and thirty dollars’ worth of ice cream in my freezer at all times” — not to eat, but as an “emergency backup system” in case one of her favorite shops or stores runs out.

Her follow-up story to her Washington Post article, titled “I Have Little Time Left. I Hope My Goodbye Inspires You,” appeared on the newspaper’s homepage less than two weeks before she died.

“I am choosing to focus my limited time and energy on doing the things I love with the people I care most about. It’s a formula that works, I think, no matter where you are in your life,” she wrote.

In an article written after she died , her husband, the writer Dan White, wrote that she had dictated her last essay to him from a reading room at UC Santa Cruz with a view of a redwood forest. He said she had gotten hundreds of personal responses: A handful “unwelcome, including missives from ultrareligious people wanting my proudly Jewish wife to get saved to spare herself from hellfire,” but the vast majority said Ettinger had said inspired them to make the most of their lives, however long they are dealt.

“Amy had no way of predicting that the lines she composed on the spot would be calls to action for readers from all over the United States, as well as Canada, Poland, France and Greece,” White wrote.

Jewish Life Stories: A legendary Washington hostess and peacemaker, and an Israeli champion of civil rights

Bert Pogrebin, attorney and partner to leading feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, dies at 89

Maurice El Medioni, Algerian Jewish pianist revered among Jews and Muslims, dies at 95

Joseph Lieberman, centrist senator and first Jew on a major presidential ticket, dies at 82

Israeli-American Nobelist Daniel Kahneman, who reframed economic decision-making, dies at 90

Allegory of the Cave by Plato Essay

Although antiquity, Plato’s Myth of the Cave is extraordinarily relevant today and can be interpreted in relation to how modern man absorbs information. Thus, Plato’s myth is an allegory, revealing a series of eternal philosophical ideas. Among them is the existence of objective truth, which is independent of people’s opinions; the presence of constant deceptions that make a person stay away from this truth; and the need for qualitative changes to access the truth.

Current scenarios can be easily compared with the ideas of Plato, reflected in his myth of the cave. One example is the information broadcast by the media today. This process can be analyzed through the stages of Plato’s allegory. The starting point is deception when the reality represented by the sources of information is only a shadow of reality and is filled with subjective ideas. At this stage, people consume information without even questioning it. Plato explains why people are so easily succumbed to misinformation, which is sometimes an obvious deception. According to Lawhead (2014), the point is that when people have no reason to doubt something, they do not, and lies prevail. Thus, the majority absorbs information without giving it critical analysis.

Some manage to reach the second stage, liberation, through questioning, analysis, research, and study. People become restless and insecure at this stage as beliefs are undermined and shaken. To get through this state, it is necessary to continue to move forward and discover new knowledge. Then follows the most challenging stage of acceptance, which involves rejecting old beliefs and adopting new ones. Plato considered that the past determines how a person experiences the present (Lawhead, 2014). Therefore, the philosopher suggested that a radical change in the way of understanding things leads to confusion and discomfort.

Finally, there is the spread of new ideas, which is characterized by confusion, contempt, misunderstanding, and even hatred, as the fundamental dogmas that are generally accepted by society are questioned. Thus, the meaning of Plato’s myth lies in the fact that reality can only be comprehended after a person leaves the cave and remains there, despite the difficulties that arise. Remaining in a cave, or in the modern sense, tied to a screen, one sees a distortion of reality and remains limited by the controlling forces.

Lawhead, W. F. (2014). The voyage of discovery: A historical introduction to philosophy (4 th ed.). Cengage Learning.

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IvyPanda. (2023, November 16). Allegory of the Cave by Plato. https://ivypanda.com/essays/allegory-of-the-cave-by-plato-essay-examples/

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(This is a summary of a chapter in a book I often used in university classes: Thirteen Theories of Human Nature.Phrases in brackets are my commentaries.) Plato (427-347 BCE) "was one of the first to argue that the systematic use of our reason can show us the best way to live." [Platonic thinking is part of this rise of reason in ancient Greece—often called the Greek miracle.
Plato's Theory of Forms: Summary
In the world of philosophy, Plato is one of the most celebrated and studied philosophers. One of his major works is elucidation of 'Forms' which he describes them as supra-sensible entities. According to him, 'Forms' or 'ideas' are none mental entities and do not depend upon human mind. We will write a custom essay on your topic.
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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 ...
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Read our Plato's ideal state essay to learn more about the key notions of Plato's philosophy. ... Plato's Ideal State: Conclusion. In the end, Plato's concept of the ideal state was based on the principle of justice and presented a kind of monarchy where citizens were divided into social groups by their primary tasks. Among other things ...
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Summary. The Socrates of Plato's Socratic dialogues was in quest of definitions because he thought they were required for living right: he supposed that in order to know whether certain actions were courageous, or pious, or admirable, one must know what the courageous, the pious, and the admirable are. We laid out a theory of definition for ...
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ISBN 9781461640943 . $27.95 (pb). Zina Giannopoulou. [Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.] This collection of twelve essays presents us with some of the best recent scholarship on Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. By paying attention to the literary and the philosophical elements of the Platonic texts, leading ...
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The article is the concluding chapter from Alexei F. Losev's 1930 massive treatise Essays on Ancient Symbolism and Mythology. It summarizes Losev's approach to the study of Plato's doctrine of ideas, i.e., his method, sources of influence, and evolution of his view of Plato from 1916 to 1930.
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This collection of essays (hereafter RN) derives initially from a conference on Plato's Timaeus and related works, held in Lampester in August 1998. Four of the papers given then (by Burgess, Campbell, Opsomer and Zedda) are incorporated in RN, with additional original contributions from Barker, Dean-Jones, Gill and Wright.
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Show full item record. Through a careful survey of several significant Platonic texts, mainly focussing on the nature of knowledge, Essays on Plato's Epistemology offers the reader a fresh and promising approach to Plato's philosophy as a whole. From the very earliest reception of Plato's philosophy, there has been a conflict between a ...
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An Innovating approach to Plato's philosophy. Through a careful survey of several significant Platonic texts, mainly focussing on the nature of knowledge, Essays on Plato's Epistemology offers the reader a fresh and promising approach to Plato's philosophy as a whole. From the very earliest reception of Plato's philosophy, there has ...
Conclusion
Scott, Dominic, 'Conclusion', Levels of Argument: A Comparative Study of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics ... In Plato's case, the shorter is the one that Socrates actually takes in the Republic, and it uses a combination of political and psychological analysis, based on a functional account of human nature. The longer ...
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Compare and Contrast: Plato and Aristotle Essay
Their perspectives on the government, ethics, justice, and other concepts shaped the era. In order to compare and contrast Plato and Aristotle, this essay will discuss the philosophers separately. Their background, principles, and central concepts will be explored in two sections. After that, in the Plato and Aristotle comparison, the essay ...
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Essays on Plato's Epistemology on JSTOR
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Plato's Allegory of the Cave: Unveiling Truth and Enlightenment
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Plato. An allegory, by definition, is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other then the literal. An allegory is referred to as a figure of language but it does not need to be expressed this way. It can be expressed in pictures, sculptures, and other forms of art. The "Allegory of the Cave" is of that used by Plato ...
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Essay about Plato. Plato was a philosopher and educator in ancient Greece. He was one of the most important thinkers and writers in the history of Western culture. Plato was born in Athens into a family that was one of the oldest and most distinguished in the city. His father Ariston died when Plato was only a child.
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Allegory of the Cave by Plato Essay. Although antiquity, Plato's Myth of the Cave is extraordinarily relevant today and can be interpreted in relation to how modern man absorbs information. Thus, Plato's myth is an allegory, revealing a series of eternal philosophical ideas. Among them is the existence of objective truth, which is ...

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