Plato himself, though, was well aware of the limitations of his theory, and in particular he later concocted the "Third Man Argument" against his own theory: if a Form and a particular are alike , then there must be another third thing by possession of which they are alike, leading to an infinite regression.
In a later rather unsatisfactory version of the theory, he tried to circumvent this objection by positing that particulars do not actually exist as such: rather, they "mime" the Forms, merely appearing to be particulars.
In the "Timaeus" , Plato gave his account of the natural sciences physics, astronomy, chemistry and biology and the creation of the universe by the Demiurge. Unlike the creation by the God of medieval theologians, Plato's Demiurge did not create out of nothing , but rather ordered the cosmos out of already-existing chaotic elemental matter , imitating the eternal Forms.
Plato took the four elements fire, air, water and earth , which he proclaimed to be composed of various aggregates of triangles , and made various compounds of these into what he called the Body of the Universe. In recent years, more emphasis has been placed on Plato's unwritten teachings , which were passed on orally to his students and not included in the dialogues on several occasions, Plato stressed that the written transmission of knowledge was faulty and inferior to the spoken logos.
We have at least some idea of this from reports by his students , Aristotle and others, and from the continuity between his teachings and the interpretations of Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists. One recurring theme is that the first principle of everything, including the causation of good and of evil and of the Forms themselves, is the One the cause of the essence of the Forms. It can be argued, then, that Plato's concept of God affirms Monotheism , although he also talked of an Indefinite Duality which he also called Large and Small.
In Epistemology , although some have imputed to Plato the remarkably modern analytic view that knowledge is justified true belief , Plato more often associated knowledge with the apprehension of unchanging Forms and their relationships to one another.
He argued that knowledge is always proportionate to the realm from which it is gained, so that, if one derives an account of something experientially then because the world of sense is always in flux the views attained will be mere opinions. On the other hand, if one derives an account of something by way of the non-sensible Forms, then the views attained will be pure and unchanging because the Forms are unchanging too.
In several dialogues, Plato also floated the idea that knowledge is a matter of recollection "anamnesis" , and not of learning, observation or study.
Thus, knowledge is not empirical , but essentially comes from divine insight. To a large extent, it is Plato who is responsible for the modern view of the Sophist as a greedy and power-seeking instructor who uses rhetorical sleight-of-hand and ambiguities of language in order to deceive , or to support fallacious reasoning. He was at great pains in his dialogues to exonerate Socrates from accusations of Sophism.
In Ethics , Plato had a teleological or goal-orientated worldview, and the aim of his Ethics was therefore to outline the conditions under which a society might function harmoniously.
He considered virtue to be an excellence of the soul, and, insofar as the soul has several components e. Finally, justice is that excellence which consists in a harmonious relation of the other three parts. He believed, then, that virtue was a sort of knowledge the knowledge of good and evil that is required to reach the ultimate good or eudaimonia , which is what all human desires and actions aim to achieve , and as such he was an early proponent of Eudaimonism or Virtue Ethics.
Plato's philosophical views had many societal and political implications, especially on the idea of an ideal state or government much influenced by the model of the severe society of Sparta , although there is some discrepancy between his early and later views on Political Philosophy.
Some of his most famous doctrines are contained in the "Republic" the earliest example of a Utopia , dating from his middle period , as well as in the later "Statesman" and the "Laws". In general terms, Plato drew parallels between the tripartite structure of the individual soul and body "appetite-stomach", "spirit-chest" and "reason-head" and the tripartite class structure of societies. He divided human beings up, based on their innate intelligence, strength and courage, into: the Productive Workers , laborers, farmers, merchants, etc, which corresponds to the "appetite-stomach"; the Protective Warriors , the adventurous, strong and brave of the armed forces, which corresponds to the "spirit-chest"; and the Governing Rulers or Philosopher Kings , the intelligent, rational, self-controlled and wise, who are well suited to make decisions for the community, which corresponds to the "reason-head".
The Philosophers and the Warriors together are thus the Guardians of Plato's ideal state. Plato concluded that reason and wisdom rather than rhetoric and persuasion should govern, thus effectively rejecting the principles of Athenian democracy as it existed in his day as only a few are fit to rule. A large part of the "Republic" then addresses how the educational system should be set up his important contribution to the Philosophy of Education to produce these Philosopher Kings, who should have their reason, will and desires united in virtuous harmony a moderate love for wisdom, and the courage to act according to that wisdom.
The Philosopher King image has been used by many after Plato to justify their personal political beliefs. He also made some interesting arguments about states and rulers. He argued that it is better to be ruled by a tyrant since then there is only one person committing bad deeds than by a bad democracy since all the people are now responsible for the bad actions.
He predicted that a state which is made up of different kinds of souls will tend to decline from an aristocracy rule by the best to a timocracy rule by the honorable , then to an oligarchy rule by the few , then to a democracy rule by the people and finally to tyranny rule by a single tyrant.
In the "Laws" , probably Plato's last work and a work of enormous length and complexity, he concerned himself with designing a genuinely practicable if admittedly not ideal form of government, rather than with what a best possible state might be like.
He discussed the empirical details of statecraft , fashioning rules to meet the multitude of contingencies that are apt to arise in the "real world" of human affairs , and it marks a rather grim and terrifying culmination of the totalitarian tendencies in his earlier political thought. Plato's views on Aesthetics were somewhat compromised and he had something of a love-hate relationship with the arts.
He believed that aesthetically appealing objects were beautiful in and of themselves , and that they should incorporate proportion , harmony and unity among their parts. As a youth he had been a poet , and he remained a fine literary stylist and a great story-teller. However, he found the arts threatening in that they are powerful shapers of character. Therefore, to train and protect ideal citizens for an ideal society, he believed that the arts must be strictly controlled , and he proposed excluding poets, playwrights and musicians from his ideal Republic, or at least severely censoring what they produced.
He also argued that art is merely imitation of the objects and events of ordinary life, effectively a copy of a copy of an ideal Form. Art is therefore even more of an illusion than is ordinary experience, and so should be considered at best entertainment , and at worst a dangerous delusion. Although he invented the image of two lovers being each other's "other half" , he clearly regards actual physical or sexual contact between lovers as degraded and wasteful forms of erotic expression.
Thus, unless the power of love is channeled into "higher pursuits" culminating in the knowledge of the Form of Beauty , it is doomed to frustration, and people sadly squander the real power of love by limiting themselves to the mere pleasures of physical beauty. On an unrelated note, he is also responsible for the famous myth of Atlantis , which first appears in the "Timaeus".
Plato's consideration of epistemology , or the theory of knowledge , comes mainly in the "Theaetetus". In it, he through the person of Socrates considers three different theses - that knowledge is perception , that knowledge is true judgment , and that knowledge is true judgment together with an account - refuting each of them in turn, without leaving us with any definitive conclusion or solution. He was a pupil of Socrates, whom he considered the most just man of his time, and who, although did not leave any writings behind, exerted a large influence on philosophy.
It was perhaps because of this opinion that he retreated to his Academy and to Sicily for implementing his ideas. He visited Syracuse first in , then in , and again in , with the general purpose to moderate the Sicilian tyrants with philosophical education and to establish a model political rule. But this adventure with practical politics ended in failure, and Plato went back to Athens.
His Academy, which provided a base for succeeding generations of Platonic philosophers until its final closure in C. Mathematics, rhetoric, astronomy, dialectics, and other subjects, all seen as necessary for the education of philosophers and statesmen, were studied there. His most renowned pupil was Aristotle. Plato died in c. During his lifetime, Athens turned away from her military and imperial ambitions and became the intellectual center of Greece.
Although the Republic , the Statesman , the Laws and a few shorter dialogues are considered to be the only strictly political dialogues of Plato, it can be argued that political philosophy was the area of his greatest concern. In the English-speaking world, under the influence of twentieth century analytic philosophy, the main task of political philosophy today is still often seen as conceptual analysis: the clarification of political concepts.
To understand what this means, it may be useful to think of concepts as the uses of words. Conceptual analysis then is a mental clearance, the clarification of a concept in its meaning. As such it has a long tradition and is first introduced in Platonic dialogues. However, in contrast to what it is for some analytic philosophers, for Plato conceptual analysis is not an end to itself, but a preliminary step.
The next step is critical evaluation of beliefs, deciding which one of the incompatible ideas is correct and which one is wrong. For Plato, making decisions about the right political order are, along with the choice between peace and war, the most important choices one can make in politics. Such decisions cannot be left solely to public opinion, he believes, which in many cases does not have enough foresight and gets its lessons only post factum from disasters recorded in history.
In his political philosophy, the clarification of concepts is thus a preliminary step in evaluating beliefs, and right beliefs in turn lead to an answer to the question of the best political order. One of the most fundamental ethical and political concepts is justice.
It is a complex and ambiguous concept. It may refer to individual virtue, the order of society, as well as individual rights in contrast to the claims of the general social order. In Book I of the Republic , Socrates and his interlocutors discuss the meaning of justice. The old man of means Cephalus suggests the first definition.
Yet this definition, which is based on traditional moral custom and relates justice to honesty and goodness; i. It cannot withstand the challenge of new times and the power of critical thinking. Socrates refutes it by presenting a counterexample. If we tacitly agree that justice is related to goodness, to return a weapon that was borrowed from someone who, although once sane, has turned into a madman does not seem to be just but involves a danger of harm to both sides.
However, when Socrates finally objects that it cannot be just to harm anyone, because justice cannot produce injustice, Polemarchus is completely confused.
He agrees with Socrates that justice, which both sides tacitly agree relates to goodness, cannot produce any harm, which can only be caused by injustice. Like his father, he withdraws from the dialogue. This definition is, nevertheless, found unclear. This negative outcome can be seen as a linguistic and philosophical therapy.
They are inconsistent with other opinions held to be true. These definitions have to be supplied by a definition that will assist clarity and establish the meaning of justice. However, to propose such an adequate definition one has to know what justice really is. The way people define a given word is largely determined by the beliefs which they hold about the thing referred to by this word. A definition that is merely arbitrary or either too narrow or too broad, based on a false belief about justice, does not give the possibility of communication.
Platonic dialogues are expressions of the ultimate communication that can take place between humans; and true communication is likely to take place only if individuals can share meanings of the words they use.
Communication based on false beliefs, such as statements of ideology, is still possible, but seems limited, dividing people into factions, and, as history teaches us, can finally lead only to confusion.
Therefore, in the Republic , as well as in other Platonic dialogues, there is a relationship between conceptual analysis and critical evaluation of beliefs. The goals of these conversations are not merely linguistic, to arrive at an adequate verbal definition, but also substantial, to arrive at a right belief. The focus of the second part of Book I is no longer clarification of concepts, but evaluation of beliefs.
In Platonic dialogues, rather than telling them what they have to think, Socrates is often getting his interlocutors to tell him what they think. The next stage of the discussion of the meaning of justice is taken over by Thrasymachus, a sophist, who violently and impatiently bursts into the dialogue. In the fifth and fourth century B.
Plato describes the sophists as itinerant individuals, known for their rhetorical abilities, who reject religious beliefs and traditional morality, and he contrasts them with Socrates, who as a teacher would refuse to accept payment and instead of teaching skills would commit himself to a disinterested inquiry into what is true and just. In a contemptuous manner, Thrasymachus asks Socrates to stop talking nonsense and look into the facts.
The careful reader will notice that Thrasymachus identifies justice with either maintenance or observance of law. His statement is an expression of his belief that, in the world imperfect as it is, the ruling element in the city, or as we would say today the dominant political or social group, institutes laws and governs for its own benefit d.
The democrats make laws in support of democracy; the aristocrats make laws that support the government of the well-born; the propertied make laws that protect their status and keep their businesses going; and so on. This belief implies, firstly, that justice is not a universal moral value but a notion relative to expediency of the dominant status quo group; secondly, that justice is in the exclusive interest of the dominant group; thirdly, that justice is used as a means of oppression and thus is harmful to the powerless; fourthly, that there is neither any common good nor harmony of interests between those who are in a position of power and those who are not.
All there is, is a domination by the powerful and privileged over the powerless. The moral language of justice is used merely instrumentally to conceal the interests of the dominant group and to make these interests appear universal. The arrogance with which Thrasymachus makes his statements suggests that he strongly believes that to hold a different view from his own would be to mislead oneself about the world as it is. After presenting his statement, Thrasymachus intends to leave as if he believed that what he said was so compelling that no further debate about justice was ever possible d.
In the Republic he exemplifies the power of a dogma. Indeed he presents Socrates with a powerful challenge. Yet, whether or not what he said sounds attractive to anyone, Socrates is not convinced by the statement of his beliefs.
Beliefs shape our lives as individuals, nations, ages, and civilizations. Thrasymachus withdraws, but his statement: moral skepticism and relativism, predominance of power in human relations, and non-existence of the harmony of interests, hovers over the Western mind.
It takes the whole remainder of the Republic to present an argument in defense of justice as a universal value and the foundation of the best political order. Although large parts of the Republic are devoted to the description of an ideal state ruled by philosophers and its subsequent decline, the chief theme of the dialogue is justice. It is fairly clear that Plato does not introduce his fantastical political innovation, which Socrates describes as a city in speech, a model in heaven, for the purpose of practical implementation a-b.
It provides the city with a sense of unity, and thus, is a basic condition for its health. In order to understand further what justice and political order are for Plato, it is useful to compare his political philosophy with the pre-philosophical insights of Solon, who is referred to in a few dialogues.
Biographical information about Plato is fairly scarce. The essence of the constitutional reform which Solon made in B.
In the early part of the sixth century Athens was disturbed by a great tension between two parties: the poor and the rich, and stood at the brink of a fierce civil war.
On the one hand, because of an economic crisis, many poorer Athenians were hopelessly falling into debt, and since their loans were often secured by their own persons, thousands of them were put into serfdom.
On the other hand, lured by easy profits from loans, the rich stood firmly in defense of private property and their ancient privileges. The partisan strife, which seemed inevitable, would make Athens even more weak economically and defenseless before external enemies. Appointed as a mediator in this conflict, Solon enacted laws prohibiting loans on the security of the person.
He lowered the rate of interest, ordered the cancellation of all debts, and gave freedom to serfs. He acted so moderately and impartially that he became unpopular with both parties. The rich felt hurt by the reform. The poor, unable to hold excess in check, demanded a complete redistribution of landed property and the dividing of it into equal shares. Nevertheless, despite these criticisms from both sides, Solon succeeded in gaining social peace.
He introduced a system of checks and balances which would not favor any side, but took into consideration legitimate interests of all social groups. In his position, he could easily have become the tyrant over the city, but he did not seek power for himself. After he completed his reform, he left Athens in order to see whether it would stand the test of time, and returned to his country only ten years later.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 b1, Sophistical Refutations b7. 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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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 , 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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