'Where are you going and where have you come from?' The Problem of Beginnings and Endings in Plato [AUTHOR'S FINAL MS, to appear in A. Tsakmakis, E. Kaklamanou, M. Pavlou (eds.), Framing the Dialogues: Reading Openings and Closures in Plato (Leiden, 2020)] (original) (raw)
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SECTION II, CHAPTER 1: PLATO'S EARLY DIALOGUES
This is the introductory chapter to my Section on Plato’s Early group of dialogues. It builds on Section I’s keys to understanding his dialogues and begins to evidence my holistic understanding and ordering of all the dialogues (viz. that they compose a whole of three parts, each divided into three parts), which is itself based on the programme of teaching and learning they themselves teach. To this end, S.II.1 first outlines my general approach to Plato’s dialogues. It then introduces the Early group, its members, method, common pattern and features, and three methods of teaching its three groups of character (its three subgroups). The next chapters to be posted in this Section will then examine each dialogue in each of the three Early dialogue subgroups.
Introduction to the Study of Plato
Cambridge Companion to Plato, 2022
This chapter offers a guide to reading Plato’s dialogues, including an overview of his corpus. We recommend first considering each dialogue as its own unified work, before considering how it relates to the others. In general, the dialogues explore ideas and arguments, rather than presenting parts of a comprehensive philosophical system that settles on final answers. The arc of a dialogue frequently depends on who the individual interlocutors are. We argue that the traditional division of the corpus (into Socratic, middle, late stages) is useful, regardless of whether it is a chronological division. Our overview of the corpus gives special attention to the Republic, since it interweaves so many of his key ideas, even if nearly all of them receive longer treatments in other dialogues. Although Plato recognized the limits inherent in written (as opposed to spoken) philosophy, he devoted his life to producing these works, which are clearly meant to help us seek the deepest truths. Little can be learned from reports of Plato’s oral teaching or the letters attributed to him. Understanding the dialogues on their own terms is what offers the greatest reward.
A Context for Plato's Dialogues [ 2007 ]
This paper has appeared in "Philosophy and Dialogue. Studies on Plato’s Dialogues", ed. by A. Bosch-Veciana and J. Montserrat-Molas, Barcelonesa d’Edicions, Barcelona 2007, vol. I, pp. 15-31. --- The supposed disproportion between Plato and every other strictly contemporary writer of Socratic dialogues, reinforced as it is by an unbridgeable divide between the considerable knowledge available to us about the former (along with the immense interpretive work devoted to his writings) and the meagre knowledge available about the latter, has generally prevented the scholarly community from paying due attention to what Plato may have had in common with his fellows, and from appreciating how the availability of many Socratic dialogues for contemporary readers and the success of the Sokratikoi logoi (as a literary genre) may have affected the shaping of any new Socratic dialogue, his own included. This is mi starting point in search of a better balance betwen Plato and other Socratic writers of the same period.
Plato Part I: The ‘Early’ and ‘Middle’ Dialogues
A Short History of Ethics and Economics
This paper extends an earlier work (Alvey 2010a), which sets the context of the ancient ethics and economy, and is a companion to (Alvey 2010b), which deals with Xenophon (434-355 BC). In this paper I discuss Plato (427-347 BC). Like Xenophon, he was a student of Socrates (469-399 BC). Subsequently, Plato became the teacher of Aristotle (384-322 BC). Plato wrote primarily dialogues, rather than treatises. These have been classified, according to assumed composition date, into 'early', 'middle', and 'late' dialogues. I propose to show some of the ethical elements in the political economy of Plato's 'early' and 'middle' dialogues. In these dialogues Plato sometimes claims that possession of intellectual and moral virtue is sufficient for eudaimonia (human flourishing). Plato says little, in these dialogues, about household management (oikonomia or oikonomikē), or microeconomics. His analysis focuses on the psychology (i.e. the soul) of the individual and the Greek city (polis). In the language of Amartya Sen, there is a strong 'ethics-related' view of motivation in these dialogues. After a brief introduction, in the second section I discuss the rule of reason and hedonism in the Gorgias (one of the 'early' dialogues). The third section discusses the Euthydemus (another 'early' dialogue) and the Phaedo (a 'middle' dialogue). The final section discusses Plato's most famous work, the Republic (another 'middle' dialogue).
Academia Letters, 2021
In trying to address the question, "why did Plato write dialogues?" this reflection expands on Andrea Nightingale's claims concerning the way in which Plato adopted and adapted the ancient social practice of theoria in order to articulate the characteristics of philosophy as he conceived it. At the center of its building on Nightingale's insights is the following question: in what way did Plato's use of the dialogue form come to facilitate the transition 'from wander to wonder' that Nightingale claims was crucial for Plato's legitimization of philosophy? In unpacking the response to this interrogation, the present piece proceeds to explicate how Plato used dialogue to reproduce the transformative power of the liminal phase characteristic of physical journeys. In doing this it shows that the use of the dialogue form as a tool for philosophical development was not an option but a methodological necessity in light of Plato's drawing from the traditional social practice the Greek called theoria, a practice that not only embraced a disposition for "sacred visualization" but also demanded a capacity for estrangement and disorientation. In discussing our claim that Plato used the dialogue form as a way to instantiate liminality (a necessary move in light of the way in which his articulation of philosophy proceeded to draw from the practice of "traditional theoria"), the present reflection builds on Andrea Nightingale's claims concerning the ancient use of "traditional theoria," which the author shows to
Unpublished Paper, 2024
The Dialogues of Plato are notorious for their internal contradictions. Generally, these have been considered to be philosophical problems with philosophical solutions. This paper suggests that the contradictions in the Dialogues are not philosophical problems but result from the way they were written. The approach taken is to analyse the Dialogues as texts whose component parts have been arranged in distinctive ways, revealing evidence as to their manner of creation. The analysis reveals the Dialogues of Plato to be constructed from multiple genre fragments, many of them Socratic dialogues, but also speeches, stories, conversations, narration, and recitation. Fragments of one genre are frequently linked by those of another to create longer textual chains. It is proposed that this distinctive and unusual compositional strategy results from Plato adapting existing transcripts of Socratic conversations and speeches as the starting point for each Dialogue. Plato extended and elucidated these fragmentary transcripts by adding conversational links, passages of 'pseudo dialogue', myths, and explanatory narratives to create the lengthy and noble discourses he envisaged. This provides a simple explanation for the interpretive problems identified in the Dialogues that meets the principle of parsimony, removing the need for abstruse philosophical solutions. Understanding the Dialogues of Plato as the result of pragmatic writing processes makes them more real as historic and artistic documents, and more legible as philosophical ones.