SOCRATES

(469 BC–399 BC)

Socrates
Socrates is remembered as a Greek philosopher. He was born in 470 BC and died in 399 BC.
He is regarded as a puzzling personality as although he did not write any information, he
completely and permanently altered the method of understanding and thinking philosophy.
He laid the basis of Western philosophy. Considering the standard of fifth-century Athens,
his appearance, demeanor, personality, methods and views were exotic. It is said that he had
large, bulging, crab-like eyes, a flat and upturned nose and large, fleshly, ass-like lips. He
grew long hair and roamed, without having a wash, barefooted. He looked arrogant and his
boastful, conceited movements caused the enemy soldiers to maintain a safe distance. Plato,
Xenophon and Aristophanes are the source of information regarding him. He had three sons
named Lamprocles, Menexenus and Sophronisucs. It was declared that he was corrupting the
young men in Athens and hence punished to death by consuming poisonous hemlock.

Socratic method
This is also called as the Method of Elenchus or Socratic Debate. Plato was the first to
describe it in the "Socratic dialogues". This is a method of philosophical inquiry used for the
assessment of key moral concepts. It is for this method that Socrates is considered as the
father and originator of moral philosophy and western ethics. The method includes the
following points:

 interrogating a range of questions regarding a pivotal issue

 providing answers to these questions
 defending certain points of view
 the ideal method to achieve triumph is that if the opponent asserts something opposite
to his own statement, then this is an evidence that the enquirer is correct
Elenchos is said to be the prime technique of the Socratic method. Socrates used this
technique to examine to nature of ethical concepts like virtue or justice. This was executed as
follows:

 an interlocutor makes a statement

 Socrates may consider it as wrong and aim to cancel it
 Socrates makes other statements
 the interlocutor accedes that these statements are contradictory to his statement
 Socrates asserts that the interlocutor's statement is false and its opposite is true
 one assessment can cause a more refined assessment of the concept under debate
 a series of elenchai may take place and culminate in a state of puzzlement

The Socratic method is to search for the assumptions that shape one's sentiment. These
assumptions are pondered over and their consistency with other beliefs is checked. A series
of logical questions are asked with the objective of assisting a person to discover the
individual opinions regarding some topic.

Socrates philosophy
Socrates asserted that an individual must know himself in order to be wise. A life that has not
been examined is not worth living. The philosophy of Socrates can be learnt through the
writings of Plato. Socrates spoke that he was like a midwife. However, he attended the souls
of men when they were in trouble. His art won when he could profoundly assess whether the
thoughts that arose in the minds of the youth were false icons or true and noble. He had the
opinion that just like midwives he was also barren. He was blamed that he asked questions
for which he himself had no answer. He replied that he was not astute or had nothing to
demonstrate that was the invention of his soul. However, those who would converse with
him would necessarily gain something. Socrates also said that the youth belonging to the
richer class accosted him of their own sweet will. They tried to ape him by examining others.
There were many such rich youth who assumed that they knew some facts, but in fact knew
very less or nothing. It so happened that the people examined by such rich youth rather than
being angry with themselves showered their wrath on Socrates. So, he was titled as the
"villainous misleader of the youth". These people could not tell precisely how Socrates was
wrong. Only as they were large in number they could effect loud slander.
Plato
First published Sat Mar 20, 2004; substantive revision Thu Sep 17, 2009

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 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?
 Bibliography
o Translations into English
o General Overviews
o On Socrates
 o Interpretive Strategies
o Chronology of the Dialogues
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

1. Plato's central doctrines

Many people associate Plato with a few central doctrines that are advocated in his writings:
The world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there
is a more real and perfect realm, populated by entities (called “forms” or “ideas”) that are
eternal, changeless, and in some sense paradigmatic for the structure and character of our
world. 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 (see especially Meno), and that the lives we lead are to some extent a
punishment or reward for choices we made in a previous existence (see especially the final
pages of Republic). But in many of Plato's writings, it is asserted or assumed that true
philosophers — those who recognize how important it is to distinguish the one (the one thing
that goodness is, or virtue is, or courage is) from the many (the many things that are called
good or virtuous or courageous ) — are in a position to become ethically superior to
unenlightened human beings, because of the greater degree of insight they can acquire. To
understand which things are good and why they are good (and if we are not interested in such
questions, how can we become good?), we must investigate the form of good.

2. Plato's puzzles

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

3. Dialogue, setting, character

There is another feature of Plato's writings that makes him distinctive among the great
philosophers and colors our experience of him as an author. Nearly everything he wrote takes
the form of a dialogue. (There is one striking exception: his Apology, which purports to be
the speech that Socrates gave in his defense — the Greek word apologia means “defense” —
when, in 399, he was legally charged and convicted of the crime of impiety. However, even
there, Socrates is presented at one point addressing questions of a philosophical character to
his accuser, Meletus, and responding to them. In addition, since antiquity, a collection of 13
letters has been included among his collected works, but their authenticity as compositions of
Plato is not universally accepted among scholars, and many or most of them are almost
certainly not his. 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; 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. Some of the dialogues that most evidently
fall into this category are Protagoras, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Euthydemus, and Symposium.

4. Socrates

There is one interlocutor who speaks in nearly all of Plato's dialogues, being completely
absent only in Laws, which ancient testimony tells us was one of his latest works: that figure
is Socrates. Like nearly everyone else who appears in Plato's works, he is not an invention of
Plato: there really was a Socrates. 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 (Aeschines, Antisthenes, Eucleides, Phaedo), and these purport
to describe conversations he conducted with others. 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 empirical phenomena — rather than a depiction of Socrates himself. Xenophon's
depiction of Socrates, whatever its value as historical testimony (which may be
considerable), is generally thought to lack the philosophical subtlety and depth of Plato's. At
any rate, no one (certainly not Xenophon himself) takes Xenophon to be a major philosopher
in his own right; when we read his Socratic works, we are not encountering a great
philosophical mind. But that is what we experience when we read Plato. We may read Plato's
Socratic dialogues because we are (as Plato evidently wanted us to be) interested in who
Socrates was and what he stood for, but even if we have little or no desire to learn about the
historical Socrates, we will want to read Plato because in doing so we are encountering an
author of the greatest philosophical significance. No doubt he in some way borrowed in
important ways from Socrates, though it is not easy to say where to draw the line between
him and his teacher (more about this below in section 12). But it is widely agreed among
scholars that Plato is not a mere transcriber of the words of Socrates (any more than
Xenophon or the other authors of Socratic discourses). His use of a figure called “Socrates”
in so many of his dialogues should not be taken to mean that Plato is merely preserving for a
reading public the lessons he learned from his teacher.

5. Plato's indirectness

Socrates, it should be kept in mind, does not appear in all of Plato's works. He makes no
appearance in Laws, and there are several dialogues (Sophist, Statesman, Timaeus) in which
his role is small and peripheral, while some other figure dominates the conversation or even,
as in the Timaeus and Critias, presents a long and elaborate, continuous discourse of their
own. Plato's dialogues are not a static literary form; not only do his topics vary, not only do
his speakers vary, but the role played by questions and answers is never the same from one
dialogue to another. (Symposium, for example, is a series of speeches, and there are also
lengthy speeches in Apology, Menexenus, Protagoras, Crito, Phaedrus,Timaeus, and Critias;
in fact, one might reasonably question whether these works are properly called dialogues).
But even though Plato constantly adapted “the dialogue form” (a commonly used term, and
convenient enough, so long as we do not think of it as an unvarying unity) to suit his
purposes, it is striking that throughout his career as a writer he never engaged in a form of
composition that was widely used in his time and was soon to become the standard mode of
philosophical address: Plato never became a writer of philosophical treatises, even though
the writing of treatises (for example, on rhetoric, medicine, and geometry) was a common
practice among his predecessors and contemporaries. (The closest we come to an exception
to this generalization is the seventh letter, which contains a brief section in which Plato
commits himself to several philosophical points — while insisting, at the same time, that no
philosopher will write about the deepest matters. But, 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 and in his own voice. Strictly speaking, he does not
himself affirm anything in his dialogues; rather, it is the interlocutors in his dialogues who
are made by Plato to do all of the affirming, doubting, questioning, arguing, and so on.
Whatever he wishes to communicate to us is conveyed indirectly.

6. Can we know Plato's mind?

This feature of Plato's works raises important questions about how they are to be read, and
has led to considerable controversy among those who study his writings. Since he does not
himself affirm anything in any of his dialogues, can we ever be on secure ground in
attributing a philosophical doctrine to him (as opposed to one of his characters)? Did he
himself have philosophical convictions, and can we discover what they were? Are we
justified in speaking of “the philosophy of Plato”? Or, if we attribute some view to Plato
himself, are we violating the spirit in which he intended the dialogues to be read? Is his
whole point, in refraining from addressing his readers as an author of treatises, to discourage
them 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? 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 (not that character) is trying to
lead us to believe, through the writing that he is presenting to our attention. We need to
interpret the work itself to find out what it, or Plato the author, is saying. Similarly, when we
ask how a word that has several different senses is best understood, we are asking what Plato
means to communicate to us through the speaker who uses that word. We should not suppose
that we can derive much philosophical value from Plato's writings if we refuse to entertain
any thoughts about what use he intends us to make of the things his speakers say. Penetrating
the mind of Plato and comprehending what his interlocutors mean by what they say are not
two separate tasks but one, and if we do not ask what his interlocutors mean by what they
say, and what the dialogue itself indicates we should think about what they mean, we will not
profit from reading his dialogues.

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

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

7. Socrates as the dominant speaker

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

Of course, there are other more speculative possible ways of explaining why Plato so often
makes Socrates his principal speaker. For example, we could say that Plato was trying to
undermine the reputation of the historical Socrates by writing a series of works in which a
figure called “Socrates” manages to persuade a group of 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.

8. Links between the dialogues

There is a further reason for entertaining hypotheses about what Plato intended and believed,
and not merely confining ourselves to observations about what sorts of people his characters
are and what they say to each other. When we undertake a serious study of Plato, and go
beyond reading just one of his works, we are inevitably confronted with the question of how
we are to link the work we are currently reading with the many others that Plato composed.
Admittedly, many of his dialogues make a fresh start in their setting and their interlocutors:
typically, Socrates encounters a group of people many of whom do not appear in any other
work of Plato, and so, as an author, he needs to give his readers some indication of their
character and social circumstances. But often Plato's characters make statements that would
be difficult for readers to understand unless they had already read one or more of his other
works. For example, in Phaedo (73a-b), Socrates says that one argument for the immortality
of the soul derives from the fact that when people are asked certain kinds of questions, and
are aided with diagrams, they answer in a way that shows that they are not learning afresh
from the diagrams or from information provided in the questions, but are drawing their
knowledge of the answers from within themselves. That remark would be of little worth for
an audience that had not already read Meno. Several pages later, Socrates tells his
interlocutors that his argument about our prior knowledge of equality itself (the form of
equality) applies no less to other forms — to the beautiful, good, just, pious and to all the
other things that are involved in their asking and answering of questions (75d). This
reference to asking and answering questions would not be well understood by a reader who
had not yet encountered a series of dialogues in which Socrates asks his interlocutors
questions of the form, “What is X?” (Euthyphro: what is piety? Laches: what is
courage? Charmides: What is moderation? Hippias Major: what is beauty?). 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 ofRepublic.) Why does Plato have his dominant characters
(Socrates, the Eleatic visitor) reaffirm some of the same points from one dialogue to another,
and build on ideas that were made in earlier works? If the dialogues were merely meant as
provocations to thought — mere exercises for the mind — there would be no need for Plato
to identify his leading characters with a consistent and ever-developing doctrine. For
example, Socrates continues to maintain, over a large number of dialogues, that there are
such things as forms— and there is no better explanation for this continuity than to suppose
that Plato is recommending that doctrine to his readers. Furthermore, when Socrates is
replaced as the principal investigator by the visitor from Elea (in Sophist and Statesman), the
existence of forms continues to be taken for granted, and the visitor criticizes any conception
of reality that excludes such incorporeal objects as souls and forms. The Eleatic visitor, in
other words, upholds a metaphysics that is, in many respects, like the one that Socrates is
made to defend. Again, the best explanation for this continuity is that Plato is using both
characters — Socrates and the Eleatic visitor — as devices for the presentation and defense
of a doctrine that he embraces and wants his readers to embrace as well.

9. Does Plato change his mind about forms?

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

10. Does Plato change his mind about politics?

The same point — that we must view the dialogues as the product of a single mind, a single
philosopher, though perhaps one that 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.

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

Many contemporary scholars find it plausible that when Plato embarked on his career as a
philosophical writer, he composed, in addition to his Apology of Socrates, a number of short
ethical dialogues that contain little or nothing in the way of positive philosophical doctrine,
but are mainly devoted to portraying the way in which Socrates punctured the pretensions of
his interlocutors and forced them to realize that they are unable to offer satisfactory
definitions of the ethical terms they used, or satisfactory arguments for their moral beliefs.
According to this way of placing the dialogues into a rough chronological order —
associated especially with Gregory Vlastos's name (see especially his Socrates Ironist and
Moral Philosopher, chapters 2 and 3) — Plato, at this point of his career, was content to use
his writings primarily for the purpose of preserving the memory of Socrates and making
plain the superiority of his hero, in intellectual skill and moral seriousness, to all of his
contemporaries — particularly those among them who claimed to be experts on religious,
political, or moral matters. Into this category of early dialogues (they are also sometimes
called “Socratic” dialogues) are
placed:Charmides, Crito, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor, I
on, Laches, Lysis, andProtagoras, (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 — 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).

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 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
thatLaws 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
linksSophist 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 Sophistthe lessons that are to be drawn from Parmenides.
Similarly, Timaeus opens with a reminder of some of the principal 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 — is a useful tool for the understanding of his thought. 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 counting 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 andCharmides are widely assumed to be early dialogues, they might have
been written around the same time as Symposiumand 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;
andCrito 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, andPhilebus. 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. 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 a conversation that really took place.

12. Why dialogues?

It is equally unrealistic to suppose that when Plato embarked on his career as a writer, he
made a conscious decision to put all of the compositions that he would henceforth compose
for a general reading public (with the exception of Apology) in the form of a dialogue. If the
question, “why did Plato write dialogues?”, which many of his readers are tempted to ask,
pre-supposes that there must have been some such once-and-for-all decision, then it is poorly
posed. It makes better sense to break that question apart into many little ones: better to ask,
“Why did Plato write this particular work (for example: Protagoras, or Republic,
or Symposium, or Laws) in the form of a dialogue — and that one (Timaeus, say) mostly in
the form of a long and rhetorically elaborate single speech?” than to ask why he decided to
adopt the dialogue form.
The best way to form a reasonable conjecture about why Plato wrote any given work in the
form of a dialogue is to ask: what would be lost, were one to attempt to re-write this work in
a way that eliminated the give-and-take of interchange, stripped the characters of their
personality and social markers, and transformed the result into something that comes straight
from the mouth of its author? This is often a question that will be easy to answer, but the
answer might vary greatly from one dialogue to another. In pursuing this strategy, we must
not rule out the possibility that some of Plato's reasons for writing this or that work in the
form of a dialogue will also be his reason for doing so in other cases — perhaps some of his
reasons, so far as we can guess at them, will be present in all other cases. For example, the
use of character and conversation allows an author to enliven his work, to awaken the interest
of his readership, and therefore to reach a wider audience. The enormous appeal of Plato's
writings is in part a result of their dramatic composition. Even treatise-like compositions
— Timaeus and Laws, for example — improve in readability because of their conversational
frame. Furthermore, the dialogue form allows Plato's evident interest in pedagogical
questions (how is it possible to learn? what is the best way to learn? from what sort of person
can we learn? what sort of person is in a position to learn?) to be pursued not only in the
content of his compositions but also in their form. Even in Laws such questions are not far
from Plato's mind, as he demonstrates, through the dialogue form, how it is possible for the
citizens of Athens, Sparta, and Crete to learn from each other by adapting and improving
upon each other's social and political institutions.

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

Bibliography

Translations into English

 Cooper, John M. (ed.), 1997, Plato: Complete Works, Indianapolis: Hackett.

 Plato (427—347 BCE)

Plato

Plato is one of the world’s best known and most widely read and studied philosophers. He
was the student of Socrates and the teacher ofAristotle, and he wrote in the middle of the
fourth century B.C.E. in ancient Greece. Though influenced primarily by Socrates, to the
extent that Socrates is usually the main character in many of Plato’s writings, he was also
influenced by Heraclitus, Parmenides, and thePythagoreans.

There are varying degrees of controversy over which of Plato’s works are authentic, and in
what order they were written, due to their antiquity and the manner of their preservation
through time. Nonetheless, his earliest works are generally regarded as the most reliable of
the ancient sources on Socrates, and the character Socrates that we know through these
writings is considered to be one of the greatest of the ancient philosophers.

Plato’s middle to later works, including his most famous work, the Republic, are generally
regarded as providing Plato’s own philosophy, where the main character in effect speaks for
Plato himself. These works blend ethics, political philosophy, moral
psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics into an interconnected and systematic
philosophy. It is most of all from Plato that we get the theory of Forms, according to which
the world we know through the senses is only an imitation of the pure, eternal, and
unchanging world of the Forms. Plato’s works also contain the origins of the familiar
complaint that the arts work by inflaming the passions, and are mere illusions. We also are
introduced to the ideal of “Platonic love:” Plato saw love as motivated by a longing for the
highest Form of beauty—The Beautiful Itself, and love as the motivational power through
which the highest of achievements are possible. Because they tended to distract us into
accepting less than our highest potentials, however, Plato mistrusted and generally advised
against physical expressions of love.
 Zeno
(Zeno of Citium, 300 - 260 B.C.)

Philosophy

1. One to live in accord with Nature; worldly Nature and human nature.
2. The Unity of All; all gods; all substance; all virtue; all mankind into a Cosmopolis
(Universal City).
3. That the external world is maintained by the natural interchange of opposites (poioun / yin,
paskhon / yang)
4. That everyone has a personal, individual connection to the All; a god within.
5. That every soul has Free Will to act and that the action of the soul is opinion.
6. Simple Living through moderation and frugality.
7. That spiritual growth comes from seeking the good. 
8. That Virtue is the sole good, Vice the sole evil, and everything else indifferent.
9. That the Cardinal Virtues are Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance.
10. That the path to personal happiness and inner peace is through the extinguishing of all
desire to have or to affect things beyond ones control and through living for the present
without hope for or fear of the future; beyond the power of opinion.
11. The sequential reabsorption and recreation of the Universe by the Central Fire; the
Conflagration.
 Comenius, John Amos
(1592–1670)
Contributions

Comenius is best known for his innovations in pedagogy, but one cannot gain an adequate
appreciation of his educational ideas without recognizing his religious and metaphysical
convictions. Despite the prevalent human suffering of his day, Comenius remained optimistic
about the future of mankind, as he believed in the immanence of God and the imminence of
God's kingdom on Earth. As God's creations, humans were necessarily good, not corrupt.
Comenius also felt that Christ's Second Coming would end human strife but that people
themselves could act in ushering the new millennium by engaging in pansophy, or the
lifelong study of an encyclopedic system of human knowledge. By seeing the harmony
among everything in the universe, all human beings would come to acknowledge God's glory
and presence in themselves and in nature.

Specifically, Comenius characterized human life–from the mother's womb to grave–as a

series of educational stages in which objects from nature would serve as the basis of
learning. In this, he was influenced by the writings of the English statesman Sir Francis
Bacon, an early advocate of the inductive method of scientific inquiry. Comenius believed
that true knowledge could be found in things as they existed in reality and when one came to
understand how they came about. As a result, Comenius urged all people to recognize the
interconnections and harmony among philosophical, theological, scientific, social, and
political facts and ideas. That way, one could reconcile three seemingly distinct worlds: the
natural, the human, and the divine. Comenius felt that disagreements among religious,
scientific, and philosophic enterprises arose because each held only a partial understanding
of universal truth–but that all could exist harmoniously through pansophic awareness.
Viewing the human mind as infinite in its capacity (as the benevolent gift of God), Comenius
advocated universal education so that the souls of all people would be enlightened in this
fashion. Through universal education and pedagogy, pansophy would eliminate human
prejudice and lead to human perfection–a state of being that God had intended for man.
Works

Perhaps Comenius's most familiar work is the Great Didactic, which he originally wrote in

1632. As Comenius held the conviction that pansophy was necessary for the spiritual
salvation of humankind, he reasoned that a good man (a rational being who understood God
through nature), and ultimately a good society, could only be created if all people acquired
encyclopedic knowledge. In order to guarantee that this would occur, Comenius delineated a
universal teaching method or standard set of pedagogical postulates that would facilitate an
effective communication of knowledge between the teacher and student. Delineating four
levels of schools lasting six years each, Comenius was one of the first educators to
recommend a coherent and standard system of instruction. Indeed, Comenius suggested that
the universality of nature dictated that all people shared common stages of intellectual
development. As a result, he reasoned, teachers needed to identify their students' stages of
development and match the level of instruction accordingly. Lessons should proceed from
easy to complex at a slow and deliberate pace. Furthermore, Comenius argued that the
acquisition of new material began through the senses–an idea that reflected the rise of
empiricism in the seventeenth century.
 JOHN LOCKE

I. THEORY OF VALUE: What knowledge and skills are worthwhile learning? What are
the goals of Education?

The skill and knowledge needed to order our actions in accordance with the laws of nature;
to treat our possessions and persons responsibly, and to avoid coming under the absolute
control of others (Yolton, p. 16)

Acquiring knowledge frequently establishes a habit of doing so -satisfying natural curiosity

frequently establishes the habit of loving and esteeming all learning. Pursuit of truth is a duty
we owe to God and ourselves. The goal of education is the welfare and prosperity of the
nation -Locke conceived the nations's welfare and prosperity in terms of the personal
happiness and social usefulness of its citizens. Education for Locke provides the character
formation necessary for becoming a person and for being a responsible citizen. His education
philosophy is an effort to show how democratic constitutional monarchy might be preserved
and improved (Deighton, p. 20)

II. THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE What is knowledge? How is it different from belief?

What is a mistake? A lie?

Knowledge is publicly verifiable, measurable, plain, demonstrable facts - not imagination

the best instance of knowing is intuiting - by intuiting is meant a power which the mind
possesses of apprehending truth Knowledge, like good character, is a set of mental habits
rather than a body of belief Knowledge is limited to imperfections of ideas we have; we can
have probable knowledge even when we can't have certain knowledge Knowledge is the
perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas (Hutchins, p. 347) - may be four
sorts: identity or diversity, relation, co-existence and real existence Knowing is an infallible
intuition; opening is coming to a conclusion after weighing the evidence, but without
certainty. Mistakes and lies would be a lack of evidence and defiance of evidence.

III. THEORY OF HUMAN NATURE What is a human being? How does it differ from

other species? What are the limits of human potential?

Man becomes moral through education - humans have no innate ideas  of God, no innate
moral truths, no natural inclination of virtue - Locke defined man as both rational and moral
Man is subject to the rule of natural law which was ultimately God's law made known to man
through the voice of reason  Locke's denial of innate ideas put a premium on individual
effort, on the labor necessary to gain knowledge from experience (Tarcov, P. 83). Man could
be ruled and be free - man is endowed with natural rights such as life, liberty and
property (Cranston,, p. 12)

IV. THEORY OF LEARNING What is learning? How are skills and knowledge acquired?

The learning that gentlemen should possess is general, according to Locke Learning is the

last and least part of education. Learning is a great help to virtue and wisdom, but without
them it produces only the more foolish or worse men From infancy onwards, the child's
efforts toward bodily pleasure and toward power in possessions and over others should be
thoroughly frustrated. The result will be that habits of self-centered, aggressive behavior and
of preferring ignorance to learning will not become established. Skills and knowledge are
acquired by example and practice instead of charging of children's memories with rules and
principals 

Unconscious habits are bred by practice and manners  learned by example 

V. THEORY OF TRANSMISSION

Who is to teach? By what methods? What will the curriculum be?

The goal of the gentlemen's education cannot be achieved by sending him to a school.
Learning should be superintended by a tutor assisted by genuinely interested parents. For
working classes, poor children of both sexes between the ages of 3-14 should be compelled
to attend school with "teachers" Locke attacked ordinary method of teaching - manners
learned by example, latin learned by speaking. The best way to get men to do what is wanted
is not t terrify or force them but to motivate them, to arouse and then rely on desires, while
letting them think, not without justice, that they are acting for their own sakes and of their
own free will. Methods for poor - learn by practice; for gentlemen - bring pupil to practice
the activities of the gentlemanly ideal until they become habitual. Curriculum for the poor:
focus on regular worship for sake of religion and moral improvement, handicrafts and
agricultural skills, vocational arts - may have intended that young should learn to read, write
and do math but made no statements to that effect Curriculum for gentlemen: health - the
first ingredient of personal happiness; development of good character - consisting of three
groups of habits - virtue, wisdom and breeding; to include reading, writing and arithmetic,
Latin, language and literature (Greek for scholars only) ; literature of France and England,
the natural and social sciences; the arts should occupy a minor place -which Locke
considered a useless or dangerous thing Learning -that gentlemen should possess is general;
detailed learning is only for those who would become scholars; one should know in detail
what is directly useful in managing personal affairs.

VI. THEORY OF SOCIETY What is society? What institutions are involved in the

educational process? Men once lived in a state of natural anarchy but had banded together to
form political society Men entrusted power to rulers on the condition that natural rights were
respected by rulers. Natural rights and natural law are rooted in edicts of God which were
inalienable

Men possess these traits: 1) natural freedom - right to life and liberty; 2) necessity for labor;
and 3) capacity of reason - from # 1 & 2 - f lows right of property in things which is chief
factor in foundation of society

The child enters both a family and a nation. The family's duty being slowly to awaken the
child to virtue. The government must perform its part in the social contract - to preserve the
rights to life and liberty of all the citizens Each of these communities should be guided by
moral laws, laws devised from the laws of nature which are God's laws

VII. THEORY OF OPPORTUNITY Who is to be educated? Who is to be schooled?The

citizens of the nation fall into two kinds: those who posses property to some significant
degree and those who do not. The f first group is made up of gentlemen, the second of
workingmen. Both gentlemen and workingmen ought to be personally happy and socially
useful, but since they occupy different stations in society, their happiness and usefulness
must differ. The welfare and prosperity of the nation demand that children of the propertied
class be educated in a way quite different from children of the poor. Locke believed that the
daughters of gentlemen should be education in much the same way as their sons Children of
the poor class should be kept away from schools - even the best - because they would fall
into the company of undesirables 

VIII. THEORY OF CONSENSUS Why do people disagree? How is the consensus

achieved? Whose opinion takes precedence? Wrong doing is a sign of ignorance; people
should be enlightened, use own power of reason, be prudent, reflective and calculatory
instead of being moved by impulse. The mind perceives the agreement between our idea and
itself, and a disagreement in this respect between it and all others (for example, white is
white and not black). The mind also perceives a violation between its ideas. In one sense all
the agreements are violations, for an agreement is a violation.
 Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

Pestalozzi’s principles of education are predominantly expressed in his seminal work How

Gertrude Teaches her Children. In it, he argued that young children should learn through
experience—through physical activity and through concrete experiences with objects, and
not through the world of words by studying books. His ideas can be summarized under the
following three topics:

Goal of Education
The goal of education is not to impart knowledge, but to unfold the natural faculties latent
and hidden in every human being. In another words, educators need to focus on the human
being, a child, and not on education per se.
Pestalozzi presented two general purposes of education: for development of the individual
and for the improvement of society. On the individual level, educators should strive to
educate the whole child, not just their intellect. Physical or technical knowledge, as well as
emotional development, are also important. He stressed that there should be balance between
the head, hands, and heart, i.e. between intellectual knowledge (head), physical and technical
education (hands), and moral and religious education (heart). Through developing a balance
among these three areas, a person becomes a "whole man."
On the social level, education provides the means for general development of the whole
society. In other words, the more the individuals in a society develop intellectually,
emotionally, morally, and socially through education, the more educated and regenerated the
whole society becomes. For Pestalozzi, therefore, education plays a central role in the
improvement of society.

Method of Education
Pestalozzi asserted that education should be centered on the child, not the curriculum. Since
knowledge lies within human beings, the purpose of teaching is to find the way to unfold that
hidden knowledge. Pestalozzi advocated direct experience as the best method to accomplish
this. He also advocated spontaneity and self-activity, in contrast to the rigid, teacher-
centered, and curriculum-based methods used in other schools.
Teachers should not teach through words (giving children ready-made answers), but allow
children to discover answers themselves. Nothing is better than a direct sensory experience.
Thus, in early education, Pestalozzi recommended that children use no books, but rather
learn through direct experience.
He advocated an inductive method, in which the child first learns to observe, to correct its
own mistakes, and to analyze and describe the object of inquiry. The child starts with simple
objects and simple observation, and builds toward more complex and abstract things. Only
after that can the child start to use books.
In order to allow children to obtain more experience from nature, Pestalozzi expanded
the elementary school curriculum to include geography, natural science, fine art, and music.

Discipline in the classroom

Pestalozzi maintained that the classroom should be like a family. The atmosphere must be
loving and caring, like in a good Christian family, where the family members are
cooperative, loving, and kind to one another. He developed the idea of the “family
classroom” from the way his mother raised him and his sister. Pestalozzi said "There can be
no doubt that within the living room of every household are united the basic elements of all
true human education in its whole range" (Smith 2005). Family is thus, for Pestalozzi, an
essential component of education.
Based on this assumption, Pestalozzi suggested that teachers always need to be loving and
kind, and earn the trust of the children. He believed that "without love, neither the physical
nor the intellectual powers will develop naturally" (Smith 2005). He viewed harsh discipline,
as was commonly used in schools at that time, as only serving to alienate children from the
teachers, and thus prevent their normal, natural development, particularly in areas
of morality and ethics.
 [

John Dewey

For John Dewey, education and democracy are intimately connected.

According to Dewey good education should have both a societal purpose and purpose for
the individual student.  For Dewey, the long-term matters, but so does the short-term
quality of an educational experience.  Educators are responsible, therefore, for providing
students with experiences that are immediately valuable and which better enable the
students to contribute to society.
Dewey polarizes two extremes in education -- traditional and progressive education.
The paradigm war still goes on -- on the one hand, relatively structured, disciplined,
ordered, didactic tradition education vs. relatively unstructured, free, student-directed
progressive education. 
Dewey criticizes traditional education for lacking in holistic understanding of students and
designing curricula overly focused on content rather than content and process which is
judged by its contribution to the well-being of individuals and society. 
On the other hand, progressive education, he argues, is too reactionary and takes a free
approach without really knowing how or why freedom can be most useful in education. 
Freedom for the sake of freedom is a weak philosophy of education.  Dewey argues that we
must move beyond this paradigm war, and to do that we need a theory of experience. Thus,
Dewey argues that educators must first understand the nature of human experience. 
Dewey's theory is that experience arises from the interaction of two principles -- continuity
and interaction.  Continuity is that each experience a person has will influence his/her
future, for better or for worse.  Interaction refers to the situational influence on one's
experience.  In other words, one's present experience is a function of the interaction
between one's past experiences and the present situation.  For example, my experience of a
lesson, will depend on how the teacher arranges and facilitates the lesson, as well my past
experience of similar lessons and teachers.
It is important to understand that, for Dewey, no experience has pre-ordained value.  Thus,
what may be a rewarding experience for one person, could be a detrimental experience for
another. The value of the experience is to be judged by the effect that experience has on the
individual's present, their future, and the extent to which the individual is able to contribute
to society. Dewey says that once we have a theory of experience, then as educators can set
about progressively organizing our subject matter in a way that it takes accounts of
students' past experiences, and then provides them with experiences which will help to open
up, rather than shut down, a person's access to future growth experiences, thereby
expanding the person's likely contribution to society.
Dewey examines his theory of experience in light of practical educational problems, such
as the debate between how much freedom vs. discipline to use.  Dewey shows that his
theory of experience (continuity and interaction) can be useful guides to help solving such
issues. Throughout, there is a strong emphasis on the subjective quality of a student's
experience and the necessity for the teacher of understanding the students' past experiences
in order to effectively design a sequence of liberating educational experiences to allow the
person to fulfil their potential as a member of society.
 Rene Descartes

I think, hence I am, was so certain and of such evidence, that no ground of doubt, however
extravagant, could be alleged by the sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might,
without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.

It is strange that Descartes did not further pursue this line of reasoning, as he would then
likely have solved the problems of philosophy / knowledge.

The reasoning is simple.

1. 'Cogito Ergo Sum' - I think therefore I exist (a thinking thing exists).

2. I think I exist as a material body in space and that I can see and interact with other material
things in the space around me, including other thinking things (other humans).

3. Thus three things seem to exist in an interconnected way;

i) Many thinking minds (of which I am certain of my own).

ii) Many material things (people, cars, trees, houses, earth, sun, stars, ...).
iii) One common Space (that these many minds and material things exist in).

From this there is only one way to describe reality if we abide by the rules of simplicity
(Occam's Razor) and metaphysics (necessary connection). i.e. There are many minds and
material things - but they all seem to exist in one common space. This leads to a simple
deduction of the wave structure of matter in Space which then deduces the fundamentals
of physics (without any opinions), i.e. Quantum Theory,Albert Einstein's
Relativity and Cosmology.

The complete argument is on the Truth Statements on Physical Realitypage.

I do find it strange though that many people now seem to reject Descartes argument that we
cannot doubt our thinking minds exist. As I see things, postmodernism has become
so skeptical that people even doubt that they exist as thinking things - they take the idea that
language is metaphor to illogical extremes. This is discussed more on the Friedrich
Nietzsche page.

Let us assume that we do not know reality- the solution to metaphysics(substance and its
properties). Thus any statement you make about the external world is uncertain. For example
we can say;

"I experience seeing a tree." But of course this does not mean the tree necessarily exist. The
certain truth is the personal / subjective truth (what we experience with our minds) not the
objective truth (that the tree actually exists).

Thus all we can say with certainty is "I experience seeing a tree so this experience of the tree
exists."

However, there is one and only one exception to this.

I experience thinking thus thinking things exist.

This cannot be doubted - as we must first think to doubt.

Thus we can be certain that we exist as thinking things.

What is most interesting is how we solve this, by solving metaphysics - by correctly

imagining what exists - space - the one thing that we all commonly experience existing in as
one thing. David Hume explains this problem of causation and necessary connection very
well.
 Waldorf Steiner

Philosophy

Steiner schools have a unique and distinctive approach to educating children, aiming to
enable each stage of growth to be fully and vividly enjoyed and experienced. They provide a
balanced approach to the modern school curriculum. The academic, artistic and social
aspects, or ‘head, heart & hands’, are treated as complementary facets of a single program of
learning, allowing each to throw light on the others.

This is implemented by using art as a practice, and language to develop the feelings, by
nourishing the children with the rich heritage of wise folk tales, histories, fairy stories,
poems, music and games that are part of our world civilisation. This creates the cultural
atmosphere in which the children are taught reading, writing, arithmetic, nature study,
geography, science, languages, music and other subjects.

Steiner designed a curriculum that is responsive to the developmental phases of childhood

and the nurturing of the child’s imagination in a school environment. Steiner thought that
schools should cater to the needs of the child rather than the demands of the government or
economic forces, so he developed schools that encourage creativity and free-thinking. His
teaching seeks to recognise the individuality of the child and through a balanced education,
allows them to go into the world with confidence.

The unique quality of human beings is our capacity for conscious thought. Steiner schooling
strives to support the development of well rounded human beings who are able to feel deeply
and broadly, to think penetratingly and clearly, and then to act rightly out of conscious and
free choice. The best overall statement on what is unique about Steiner education is to be
found in the stated goals of the schooling:

What is Waldorf Education?

Waldorf education is a unique and distinctive approach to educating children that is practiced
in Waldorf schools worldwide. Waldorf schools collectively form the largest, and quite
possibly the fastest growing, group of independent private schools in the world. There is no
centralised administrative structure governing all Waldorf schools; each is administratively
independent, but there are established associations which provide resources, publish
materials, sponsor conferences, and promote the movement.
Philosophy of education

Philosophy of education is the study of such questions as what education is

and what its purpose is, the nature of the knowing mind and the human
subject, problems of authority, the relationship between education and
society, etc. Since at least Rousseau, philosophy of education has been
linked to greater or lesser degrees to theories of human development. The
philosophy of education recognizes that the enterprise of civil society
depends on the education of the young, and that to educate children as
responsible, thoughtful and enterprising citizens is an intricate,
challenging task requiring deep understanding of ethical principles, moral
values, political theory, aesthetics, and economics; not to mention an
understanding of who children are, in themselves and in society.

Critics have accused the philosophy of education of being one the weakest
subfields of both philosophy and education, disconnected from philosophy (by
being insufficiently rigorous for the tastes of many "real" philosophers)
and from the broader study and practice of education (by being too
philosophical, too theoretical). However, its proponents state that is is an
exacting and critical branch of philosophy and point out that there are few
major philosophers who have not written on education, and who do not
consider the philosophy of education a necessity. For example, Plato
undertakes to discuss all these elements in The Republic, beginning the
formulation of educational philosophy that endures today.

There are certain key voices in philosophy of education, who have

contributed in large part to our basic understandings of what education is
and can be, and who have also provided powerful critical perspectives
revealing the problems in education as it has been practiced in various
historical circumstances. There is one particular strand in educational
philosophy that stands out as of extreme importance in the present time,
which may be identified as the "Democratic Tradition", because it is a
product of philosophers who, seeking to establish or preserve democracy,
turn to education as a method of choice.