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Book Notes

Socrates and Plato

CHRISTOPHER ROWE

Socratic studies evidently continue to ourish, despite continuing disagreement about what the actual subject of such studies is, or ought to be. In the preface to Lezioni socratiche,1 Michel Narcy and Gabriele Giannantoni refer to what they call une forme dappauvrissement de la gure de Socrate (10) resulting from a tendency among scholars over the past half-century either to write off the Socratic question as insoluble, or to reduce it to a kind of appendix to Platonic studies. Their own volume, containing the rst fruits of a collaborative project (Socrate dans lhistoire de la pense antique: rupture ou continuit?) based in Paris and Rome, reects an approach which takes into account the diversity of ancient traditions about Socrates: [les] visages multiples [de Socrate] qui nont pas moins contribu que le Socrate historique lui-mme faonner lhistoire ultrieure de la philosophie (ibid.).2 Socratic studies in Wisdom, Ignorance and Virtue: New Essays in Socratic Studies3 (a collection of revised versions of papers presented at the 1996 Arizona Colloquium on Socrates, edited by Mark McPherran), for its part, plainly falls into the Narcy/Giannantoni Plato-appendix category, since the essays are exclusively concerned with the Socrates who inhabits theor somepages of Plato, though the authors differ as to who he is and what he stands for. [1] For Lloyd Gerson (Socrates absolutist prohibition of wrongdoing), Socrates is the character in Platos dialogues (1), and represents more of Plato, at any stage, than he does of the historical Socrates: for this Socrates (Plato), wrongdoing means the abdication of reason, amounting to a loss of self-identity (so that no one could intelligibly take wrongdoing as a path to happiness any more than one could preside at ones own funeral: 10). William Prior (Why did Plato write Socratic dialogues?, evoking Kahns article of 1981) argues for a similar position on Socrates, rejecting the description of early dialogues as Socratic, while stopping
Gabriele Giannantoni and Michel Narcy (eds), Lezioni socratiche (Elenchos, Collana di testi e studi sul pensiero antico, 26). Bibliopolis, Napoli, 1997. pp. 373. Paperback; L. 60,000. ISBN 88 7088 322 1. 2 Note the rebaptism of these Notes as Book Notes: Socrates and Plato. 3 Mark L. McPherran (ed.), Wisdom, Ignorance and Virtue (= Apeiron 30.4, 1997). Academic Printing and Publishing, Edmonton, 1997. pp. xi + 154. Hardback/paperback; no separate price given. ISSN 0003 6390; ISBN 0 920980 70 8 (hardback), 0 920980 71 6 (paperback). Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 1999 Phronesis XLIV/1
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short of denying that their Socrates might be more like the original. [2] For Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas Smith (The problem of punishment in Socratic philosophy, which allows Socrates the intellectualist to believe in the usefulness of punishment in certain cases), he is the character by that name in Platos early dialogues (n. 1). A more circumspect version of the same position is perhaps represented by Voula Tsouna (Socrates attack on intellectualism in the Charmides), who refers to the intellectualist beliefs . . . traditionally ascribed to the Platonic Socrates (72), presumably in the Socratic dialogues (74); she argues that Critias intellectualism is importantly different. [3] By contrast, Daniel Grahams Socrates (What Socrates knew: enough, apparently, to enable him to avoid moral error, and so be virtuous in a way) is denitely the historical one (35); apparently too Mark McPherrans (Recognizing the gods of Socrates, incorporated in revised form in his book The Religion of Socrates; on which see Phronesis 43 (1998), 86-7); and perhaps Hugh Bensons (Socratic dynamic theory: a sketch), insofar as his paper uses certain dialogues to delineate a Socratic concept of dunamis as distinct from a Platonic one (80). [4] Others prefer not to show their hand: Charles Youngs First principles of Socratic ethics, by contrast (13), is just about Socrates in Platos Crito (who seems to get things rather straightforwardly wrong); and Hope May (Socratic ignorance and the therapeutic aim of the elenchos) tries to get straight about precisely what kind of ignorance Socrates tries to cure in various dialogues. [5] Finally, Scott LaBarges position (Socrates and the recognition of experts) seems ambiguous between [2] and [3]: he seeks to resolve a troubling problem Socrates raises about knowledge of knowledge in the Charmides, with the help of Platos comments on expertise in other early dialogues (52). On this showing, then, Socratic studies may be about the real Socrates, or they may not. But if they do not even claim to be, it is not clear why they should be called Socratic (this I take to be the main force of the point made by Narcy and Giannantoni); certainly not because they are based on certain Socratic dialogues, which would reinstate the historical claim. On the other hand, if they do claim to be about the real person, then we surely need to take into account the way he was read by other philosophers, and not just by Plato.4 To say this is not to deny that there are many things of acute philosophical interest in the early Plato, some of which are picked up in the McPherran volume. It is merely to enter a plea for clarication: why exactly should studying Socrates be a matter of studying (just, or mainly) a certain group of Platonic dialogues?5

4 A.A. Longs paper on Socrates in Hellenistic philosophy in Classical Quarterly for 1988 makes particularly salutary reading in this connection; cf. also Wolff in Lezioni socratiche (below). 5 One possible answer is that we could nd in these dialogues a particularly powerful philosophical position, historically associated with Socrates, which was worked out exclusively, or with special clarity, in those dialogues (see e.g. Terry Penner, Socrates

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Socrates in Plato of course still gures within the broader perspective of Lezioni socratiche; as does the sort of Platonic Socrates presently so familiar in the English-speaking world, though his outlines are redrawn in many respects. So Narcy, in one of two connected papers on the Lysis, confronts Geach and others on the Socratic fallacy, while in the other he begins from Irwin and Vlastos on the rst friend, nding in the Lysis, et prcisment dans ce que lenseignement du Lysis a de non platonicien, donc probablement de socratique, le noyau conceptuel de lthique aristotlicienne (233). Again, Jean-Franois Balaud rst criticizes aspects of Vlastos on Socrates and the elenchus in les premiers dialogues (where behind Socrates, cest bien sr galement de Platon quil sagit, 237),6 and then, in a second paper, replies to Roslyn Weiss and Vlastos on the Hippias Minor; Aldo Brancacci, in two of his papers, attempts to undermine Vlastos on Socrates, knowledge and ignorance in the Apology (most notably, perhaps, convicting him for under-translating suneidenai: this in Socrate e il tema semantico della coscienza, which starts from a testimonium in Stobaeus); and Giannantoni offers a new treatment of La religiosit di Socrate secondo Platone. But eight of the fteen papers range (also) outside Plato: two more from Narcy, on La religion de Socrate in Xenophons Memorabilia, and on Aristotle, Metaphysics 1078b17-31 (might ekeinos in b24 refer, not to Socrates, but to Democritus?); Brancacci on Socrate critico darte and Filosoa e paideia in Antistene; Giannantoni on aisthsis among the Cyrenaics and LAlcibiade di Eschine e la letteratura socratica su Alcibiade; Bruno Centrone on Il daimonion di Socrate nello pseudoplatonico Teage; and, in the longest and most ambitious paper, Francis Wolff on what it is tre disciple de Socrate. Wolff treats du lien qui unit Socrate ceux que lon appelle les socratiques (31), limited to those we know actually to have heard the man himself: Aristippus, Euclides, Antisthenes and Plato. What kind of ethical doctrine, Wolff asks, is likely to have been capable of spawning those of Socrates auditeurs (disciples, mathtai, are strictly what others have, according to contemporary reports), in all their variety? Whatever answers to it we nd here, the question looks a useful one. Add to it the still wider questions posed by Long in 1988,7

and the early dialogues, in Richard Kraut (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge 1992, 121-69). But it is not clear to how many of the authors in the McPherran volume this answer will be available. 6 So too, perhaps, for Narcy, whose two papers succeed in giving a nuanced reading of the Lysis as a whole. 7 See n. 4 above. Not unrelated to the spirit of Longs paper is Christopher Gills Ethical reection and the shaping of character: Platos Republic and Stoicism, in volume 12 of the Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, ed. John Cleary and William Wians. University Press of America, Lanham. MA, 1996. pp. xxviii + 331. $65 (hardback), $29.50 (paperback). ISBN 0 7618 0999 6 (hardback); 0 7618 1000 5 (paperback). Also on Plato in the same volume, there is Dorothea Frede, Plato, Popper and historicism; other contributors are Frederic M. Schroeder (Prophecy and remembrance in Plotinus), Andrea Nightingale (Aristotle and the

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about Socrates in Hellenistic philosophy as a whole, and the potential pickings for Socratic studies begin to look extraordinarily rich. For Sarah Kofman, in Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher,8 there can be no doubt that this Socrates is a ction, because [g]enerally speaking, any reading of any philosopher will be a symptomatic interpretation of the types of forces that lay claim to the work (1). [E]ven supposing that Socrates living words had been transcribed without betrayal . . ., like all language this speech is criture, writing in the Derridean sense, a system of differences that always allows for a gap between what was said and what was thought (3-4). Indeed, since Socrates speech is essentially ironic, is dissimulated, duplicitous, ambiguous at the very least, it is criture in this sense more than any other (4).9 Kofmans rst chapter contrasts Aristodemus and Alcibiades portraits of Socrates in the Symposium, with the aim of showing that the dialogue is more deeply rooted in ction than reality (11). Aristodemus speaks as the disciple, Alcibiades as someone who has learned (if we may translate Plato into Lacanian language) that the law of desire is castration (21). But it is Plato who has put both of them on stage, so creat[ing] the ctional gure of Socrates as a gure of mastery (30). It is impossible to distinguish what belongs to Plato and what to Socratespace Nietzsche, whose own ctional reading is in turn in the image of [his] own multiple facets, Plato and Socrates at once (36). The bulk of the book then reads Hegels, Kierkegaards and Nietzsches readings of Socrates as three Socratic novels. Kofman ends with a question which nicely indicates the starting-point of what is presumably her ownreadable, and in its way often illuminatingexcursion into the novel: [i]f the problem of Socrates has caused so much ink to ow . . . is it not because behind the case of this atopical and atypical monster, each interpreter is trying as best he can to settle his own case . . .? (247-8). From the history of philosophy as psychoanalysis to a more traditional kind of scholarship, but also to another treatment of Platos Socrates as a ction, or literary creation. The appearance of Michael Stokess new Apology,10 in the Aris

liberal and illiberal arts), Robert Heinaman (Activity and praxis in Aristotle), Long himself (Parmenides on thinking being), Sarah Broadie (Nous and nature in De anima III), and A.W. Price (Aristotelian perceptions). 8 Sarah Kofman, Socrates: Fictions of a Philosopher (rst published as Socrate(s), 1989; tr. from the French by Catherine Porter). The Athlone Press, London, 1998. Pp. vii + 296. Hardback: 45. ISBN 0 485 11460 7. 9 To allow that some speech is more criture is presumably also to allow that some is less; in which case Kofmans general project might be in danger, though apparently this will not be enough to save Socrates. 10 Michael C. Stokes, Plato: Apology (with introduction, translation and commentary). Aris & Phillips: Warminster, 1997. pp. vii + 200. 35, $49.95 (hardback); 14,95, $24.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 85668 371 X (hardback); 0 85668 372 8 (paperback). We may be dealing [in the case of Plato and Xenophon on the daimonion] less

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and Phillips series, three years after that of the de Strycker and Slings Apology volume,11 leaves anyone studying this central Socratic (or Socratic) text now uncommonly well-supplied with resources, whether philological, literary or philosophical. Stokess characteristically sober and scholarly approachno less scholarly for being unusually accessible, with extended commentary keyed to the translationmeans that future work on the Apology, or on the gure at its centre, will not safely be able to ignore this book. It includes a new translation, and a text resembl[ing] most closely that of the new Oxford Classical text of Plato, vol. I. David Roochniks new book on techn/techne in Plato12 turns its back on the division between Socrates and Plato in the dialogues, but still deals directly only with certain early13 dialogues, namely Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Republic I, and Euthydemus, then Gorgias and Protagoras . This is because one of Roochniks central purposes is to respond to those who see techne in such dialogues as meant to function as a positive theoretical model for moral knowledge (89). His own view is that Plato in fact operates with a non-technical conception of moral knowledge, one that inter alia allows for the informal mess of human life (251). The strategy is rst to examine pre-Platonic notions of techne, and then to to try to demonstrate that in none of the target dalogues is there any necessary commitment to the idea of aret in terms of those (fairly uid) notions. The use of the craft-analogy, on Roochniks account, is essentially protreptic, the aim being to encourage others to pursue a knowledge for which the model of a techne provides a useful, if nally dispensable, point of reference. This is in many ways a timely challenge: there is much to be said for the proposition that current reconstructions of Socratic/Platonic ethical thinking have given rather too large a place to the analogy with the technai, just as discussion of Socratic method may have excessively privileged too narrow a conception of the elenchus. On the other hand, in the course of criticising the SAT (the standard account of techne) Roochnik sometimes seems to misconstrue the point, or implications, of specic arguments (so e.g. on pp. 100 ff., on the Laches); and, more importantly, to underplay what look like being constant aspects of the Platonic account of moral knowledge: especially, and most surprisingly, underplaying the role of knowledge of good and bad, whichat least as it is developed in later dialoguesmay well seem to lead us back to something not so very far, in some respects, from a kind of specialist expertise. But there is plenty here that supporters of the standard account will need to take seriously, and the alternative

with different versions of a biography than with different literary creations, each designed for internal consistency (10). 11 See Phronesis 40 (1995), 226-7. 12 D. Roochnik, Of Art and Wisdom: Platos Understanding of Techne. Penn State Press, University Park, PA, 1996. pp. xii + 300. Hardback: $40/35.95. ISBN 0 271 01563 2. 13 The scare quotes are Roochniks.

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model of moral/ethical knowledge that gradually emerges, even if it may turn out not to be Platos, is an attractive one. One place where, on the face of it, Plato seems directly to endorse a moral/ political techne is the Politicus. Quite how Roochnik means to deal with this case is not clear; a few brief remarks in an appendix lead him simply to advise caution in approaching it (278). In any event, he will now himself need to take note of the full treatment of the Politicus in Melissa Lanes Method and Politics in Platos Statesman,14 which takes the dialogue as an answer to the problem posed by Euthydemus 288-92 (understood by Roochnik as helping to drive home the the point about the non-technical nature of wisdom: Roochnik 172). Lane too is a radical, portraying the Politicus as oating free from the Republic and the Laws. Its emphases are certainly different. But according to Lane, it is Platos attempt to formulate a notion of political expertise that can deal with a world seen as essentially subject to a kind of Heraclitean ux. Not law [nor apparently metaphysics], but knowledge of the kairos, is capable of accurately prescribing what is best for each individual . . . and so is entitled to political authority (199). The basis for this kind of political knowledge is provided by the method of example and division exemplied in the dialogue itself, which is able to handle dissimilarities both at the theoretical level and in the political realm. This is a rewarding book, which brings Plato into contact and contrast with diverse strands of more recent thinking. Two out of several questions that might be raised about its central theses: 1. what role, if any, do the nest and greatest things of 284a play in the activity of the ideal statesman (and if none, why are they greatest?)? 2. Does the instability of human affairs talked about at 294a relate to the idea of a the future as an open-ended set of possibilities (which is what Lane seems to suppose), or has it rather to do with a more restricted notion of unpredictability, where the outcomes in any given case are unpredictable just because of the complexity of the factors involved? If the latter, then political expertise begins to look like something that is just (?) a more exible, and comprehensive, version of the legislators; and the problems being addressed will have more to do with sayability than with those of living in a Heraclitean world.15

M.S. Lane, Method and Politics in Platos Statesman. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998. pp. xiii + 229. Hardback: 35, $59.95. ISBN 0 521 588229 6. 15 One special advantage of Lanes approach is that it largely dispenses with the problem, lurking in Republic and Laws, of the relationship between general understanding and particular application. But some sort of broader understanding (at a substantive and not just a methodological level) does seem to be in question, and it is not difcult to imagine an ideal knower who had in his/her head all the relevant general knowledge (however complex), and combined with it an ability to see just what needs to be done now (however complex the factors involved). This would make his/her expertise look much like Roochniks rst kind of techne, one wholly and reliably in control of its subject-matter: see e.g. Roochnik 42 ff., with useful references to On

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Still with politics: in Le monde de la politique,16 Jean-Franois Pradeau tackles the political aspects of the Timaeus-Critias. This is a comprehensive and imaginative treatment of two stretches of text which have rarely received independent attention. Pradeau succeeds in giving them a plausible location within the framework of Platos larger projects, while at the same time shedding possible new light on that framework. But the value of the study lies especially in its illumination of detailas for example on le souci gographique ou topographique (283) in the description of Atlantis.17 Angelica Taglias book on pistis in Plato18 is another single-minded comparative study of a concept, like Roochniks, and is perhaps liable to similar dangers: rstly, that the target concept-term may be observed without sufcient attention to the particular contexts in which it appears, and secondly that the narrowness of the focus of the investigation may leave more interesting phenomena unobserved. Thus, for example (under the rst head), Taglias own conclusions about non-Platonic usage might tend to suggest that the choice of pistis as label for one part of the Divided Line is somewhat arbitrary and makeshift; if so, the Line will not provide a secure warrant for supposing, as I think Taglia does, that pistis is a permanent component of doxa, even in the Republic; and (under the second head) the gradual rise in the stock of pistis that Taglia discovers from its low point in the Gorgias (where the term functions in a more or less opposite role to the one it is accorded in Parmenides) may just be a consequence of larger, and independently veriable, phenomena, in the form of different perspectives on what

ancient medicine. The question is perhaps, in the end, about where the emphasis is to be placed between these two aspects of political wisdom in the Politicus: by placing it on the latter, Lane offers a signicant new reading of a central document in Platonic political theory. 16 Jean-Franois Pradeau, Le monde de la politique. Sur le rcit atlante de Platon, Time (17-27) et Critias (International Plato Studies, 8). Academia Verlag, Sankt Augustin, 1997. pp. 367. Hardback: DM 98. ISBN 3 89665 048 3. 17 Also from the same author, a useful overview of Platos political thought, including the Timaeus-Critias: Jean-Franois Pradeau, Platon et la cit (Philosophies, 88). Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1997. pp. 126. Paperback: 44 FF. ISBN 2 13 048591 X; ISSN 0766 1392. On the framing concept of the polis itself, it may be useful to mention the latest product of the Copenhagen Polis Centre, defending the view that to describe the polis as a state is not as much of an anachronism as it has become the fashion to think: Mogens Herman Hansen, Polis and City-State: An Ancient Concept and its Modern Equivalent (Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre, 5; Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, Historisk-lososke Meddelelser 76). Copenhagen, 1998. Hardback: under 20. pp. 217. ISSN 0106 0481; ISBN 87 7304 293 5. 18 A. Taglia, Il concetto di pistis in Platone (Universit degli Studi di Torino, Fondo di Studi Parini-Chirio: Storia della losoa e del pensiero scientico, 6). Le Lettere, Firenze, 1998. pp. xiii + 200. Paperback: L. 38,000. ISBN 88 7166 356 X.

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can be achieved by rational means.19 Nevertheless, concept studies can certainly be useful, as this one is, not least in reminding us that the context for understanding a term includes its history, and in (thereby) giving us new angles on the texts which employ it; and it is unlikely that there will be a fuller treatment of the subject than this one. Two new books on the Parmenides, one by Robert Turnbull,20 the other by Alain Sguy-Duclot.21 Both claim to provide the key both to the dialogue and to late Plato (or indeed, in Sguy-Duclots case, to the Platonic corpus as a whole, unwritten dogmata included); but around there the similarities more or less end. Turnbull takes a Speusippean line on the second hypothesis: . . . it is clear enough . . . that Plato takes seriously this generation of the numbers/shapes from one, being, same and different and means for it to play a major role in the Parmenides (69); while for Sguy-Duclot [l]argumentation [ici] me semble se situer deux niveaux. En cela, elle est profondment ironique. En dmontrant la pluralit de lun, elle valide la deuxime hypothse. Lun en effet ne doit pas tre un pour pouvoir chapper laporie de la premire hypothse, cest--dire de lontologie parmnidienne. Mais en dmontrant que cette pluralit est une innit, elle invalide cette mme hypothse. Car elle tombe alors sous les objections classiques que Znon dEle oppose justement aux adversaires de lontologie parmnidienne (70). One does not have to agree with all the detail of Sguy-Duclots argument here to conclude that he comes off better on the second hypothesis than does Turnbulland insofar as the latters whole interpretation pivots on the positive use of the generation of numbers and shapes in this hypothesis, its prospects seem to be limited. Overall, Turnbull tends to concentrate less on expounding the text of the Parmenides than on showing it to be not incompatible with his own vision of the late Plato (an appendix on other approaches to the dialogue offers only limited arguments against a few rival readings). It is a tidy vision, which belies the complexities of the textual phenomena which it is supposed to explain; like some other solutions to the riddle of Platos maturity (Turnbull acknowledges a special afnity to Sayre), it resembles what an intelligent doxographer might make of the texts in question, or what ancient interpreters, Platonist or otherwise, actually did make of them. Thus for example the Parmenides/Plato of Parmenides 130c is apparently already familiar with an argument against forms of kinds which is reected in Aristotles Categories: maybe Plato was indeed familiar with it, and

One may also doubt how much light can be thrown on the connection in Plato between pistis/doxa and sensibles by a study of the terms themselves (141 ff.). 20 Robert G. Turnbull, The Parmenides and Platos Late Philosophy. University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1998. pp. xii + 209. Hardback: Can./US$50, 32.50. ISBN 0 8020 4236 8. 21 Alain Sguy-Duclot, Le Parmnide de Platon, ou le jeu des hypothses. Belin, Paris, 1998. pp. 311. Paperback: no price given. ISBN 2 7011 2141 8 (ISSN 0991 6458: Lextrme contemporain).

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appreciated its force, but equally possibly he was not or did not, and a cleanedup Plato will leave nothing for his colleagues and successors to argue about, in the way that they evidently did. Sguy-Duclots reading has its own special features: so for example it essentially starts from a correction of Brissons,22 seeing Plato as responding to Zeno and the sophists rather than to Parmenides. Sguy-Duclot is able to combine this approach with a plausible-looking account of the connection between the hypothetical exercise and what precedes it, which is presumably one of the criteria for deciding the success or failure of any interpretation of the Parmenides. His reading of the hypotheses also looks suitably complex, and persuasive enough, up to a point: hypothesis 1 (roughly speaking) shows how one can make wrong use of Parmenides, while the remaining eight2a becomes 3successively show how progress is possible once the necessary adjustment has been made to the Parmenidean position. Sguy-Duclots treatment of hypothesis 2 (see above) is indicative of the general sensitivity of his treatmentup until about p. 195, when there is a shift of gear, even of genre (from Platonic investigation to Platonic novel?). This later part of the book is hard to summarize, but something of its avour, even of its potential usefulness, may be glimpsed from the following sentences: La dialectique suprieure du Parmnide nous est apparue avoir une structure essentiellement dynamique. Elle procde par divisions successives, chacunes de celles-ci correspondant un tat dtermin de complexit du platonisme. En rester la ttrade23 [i.e. hypothesis 4] par exemple, cest opposer radicalement lintelligible et le sensible. Passer la pentade [hypothesis 5], cest comprendre en quoi cette opposition doit tre rectie, etc. (273). Neither Turnbull nor Sguy-Duclot24 seems to know of Giovanni Reales Per una nuova interpretazione di Platone. Rilettura della metasica dei grandi dialoghi

And also from what seems a necessary correction of Brissons translation, in the Flammarion series (1994). Two more additions to this ever-expanding series, which with its substantial introductions, notes and bibliographies continues to rival anything comparable in English: Platon: Protagoras: prsentation et traduction indite par Frdrique Ildefonse. Flammarion, Paris, 1997. pp. 265. Paperback: no price given. ISBN 2 08 070761 2; and Platon: Cratyle: prsentation et traduction indite par Catherine Dalimier. Flammarion, Paris, 1998. pp. 317. Paperback: no price given. ISBN 2 08 070954 2. 23 The use of this sort of language relates in part to Sguy-Duclots discovery of a tenth hypothesis in the Parmenides. Platos Pythagorean connections are also relevant to some of the speculative essayson The number of Justice, the nuptial number, and Platos comments on the eight Sirens in the Myth of Er and his account of the seven Circles of the Different in the Timaeus (48)in Roger Sworders diminutive Mathematical Cosmologies of Newton, Homer and Plato (Studies in Western Traditions: Occasional Papers, 5). Department of Arts, La Trobe University, Bendigo (Australia), 1997. pp. 52. Paperback: US$8.70. ISBN 0 909977 28 3. 24 That is, so far as I can tell (his book contains no bibliography).

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alla luce delle Dottrine non scritte, originally published in 1984 and in its tenth Italian edition by 1991. The book is now available in an English translation, under the title Towards a New Interpretation of Plato.25 This is not the place to review Reales ambitious project,26 but rather to express the hope that the appearance of the translated version may lead to a wider sense of the need to evaluate its assumptions and outcomes, and those of its relatives from Tbingen. The presuppositions of more orthodox, or at least more usual, ways of reading of Plato27 are hardly secure enough to allow us simply to ignore others. One section of Jaap Mansfelds appropriately many-sided Festschrift28 is on Plato: Keimpe Algra writes on Thrasymachus in Republic I, Mario Vegetti on the critique of medicine in Republic III, and Matthias Baltes on gevgonen at Timaeus 28b7 (ist die Welt real enstanden oder nicht?). Other items of most immediate interest to Platonists are John Dillon, Speusippus on pleasure; David Sedley, Alcinous epistemology; A.A. Long, Theophrastus De sensibus on Plato; David Runia, Additional fragments of Arius Didymus on physics; and John Glucker, The two Platos of Victorian Britain.29
25 Giovanni Reale, Toward a New Interpretation of Plato (tr. from the Italian by John R. Catan and Richard Davies). The Catholic University of America Press, Washington, DC, 1997. pp. xxviii + 459. $44.95, 40.45 (hardback); $29.95, $26.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 8132 0847 5 (hardback), 0 8132 0854 8 (paperback). 26 Summed up by one of its epigraphs, from Leibniz: If someone can reduce Plato to a system, he will have performed a great service for mankind. 27 Including those of the sort implied elsewhere in these Notes, which attribute to Plato a predominant interest in inquiry. The nature of inquiry (the general method by which we expand our knowledge) is the subject of James Blachowiczs wide-ranging Of Two Minds (Of Two Minds: The Nature of Inquiry (SUNY Series in Philosophy). SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 1998. No price given. ISBN 0 7914 3641 1 (hardback); 0 7914 3642 X (paperback)), which deserves mention here because of the way it takes Socratic-Platonic dialectic, as a method of inquiry, and the Meno paradox in particular, as its starting-point. I am not competent to assess the large claims made by the book (a comprehensive and revolutionary theory [which] challenges traditional epistemologys conception of justication and provides substantial new interpretations of the nature of ampliative inference, representation and meaning, Platonic and Hegelian dialectic, Kantian analysis, the heuristic funtion of models and metaphors, and the role of inquiry in the constitution of human consciousness). 28 Keimpe A. Algra, Pieter W. van der Horst, David T. Runia (eds), Polyhistor. Studies in the History and Historiography of Ancient Philosophy presented to Jaap Mansfeld on his Sixtieth Birthday (Philosophia Antiqua, 72). Brill, Leiden, 1996. pp. x + 438. Hardback: Nlg 225, $145.25. ISBN 90 04 10417 8; ISSN 0079 1687. 29 The remaining papers are by Malcolm Schoeld (Anaxagoras other world revisited), Jacques Brunschwig (Le fragment DK 70 B 1 de Mtrodore de Chio), L.M. de Rijk (On Aristotles semantics in De interpretatione 1-4), Ian Kidd (Theophrastus Fr. 184 FHS&G: some thoughts on his arguments; Tiziano Dorandi (Ricerche sulla trasmissione delle Divisioni aristoteliche), Jonathan Barnes (The catalogue of Chrysippus logical works), R.J. Hankinson (Ciceros rope [on Stoics and causation]),

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A Victorian Plato also plays a role in Images de Platon et lectures de ses uvres30 (a volume which in a way takes these Notes back to their starting-point). An introduction by Ada Neschke is followed by le Platon de Diogne Larce (Jacques Follon), Conceptions no-platoniciennes du philosophe-roi (Dominic OMeara), Platon aptre des grecs dans luvre de Clment dAlexandrie (Laura Rizzerio), Prsence et absence de Platon au Moyen-age (Hames McEvoy), Averros et la Rpublique (Rmi Brague), La Mtaphysique de Plthon. Ontologie, thologie et pratique du mythe (Lambros Couloubaritsis), Marsile Ficin, lecteur et interprte du Parmnide la Renaissance (Alexandre Etienne), Interprtation de Platon et dbat politique dans la France du XVIe sicle: Jean de Serres (15401598) (Ada Neschke), La Trinit en action au premier jour du monde. A propos de Francesco di Hollanda, De aetatibus mundi imagines (Claude Brard), Platonisme thique et platonisme chrtien: Montaigne, lectuer de Platon (J.-L. Vieillard-Baron), Les platoniciens de Cambridge: philosophie ancienne, science moderne et thologie chrtienne (John Rogers), La dcouverte de Platon par Schelling (Rdiger Bubner), Ethique et doctrine de ltat chez Platon et Hegel (Klaus Dsing), Nietzsche lecteur de Platon (Monique Dix-saut), Une interprtation de Platon dans lAngleterre victorienne (1835-1865) (Monique CantoSperber), Avant Natorp. Linterprtation des ides platoniciennes chez H. Cohen (Andr Laks), Une tape singulire dans lhistoire de linterprtation du Protagoras: la lecture du dialogue par Paul Natorp (Fabienne Blaise), Notes au bas de quelques pages de Whitehead (Daniel Nicolet), Le Sophiste de Platon dans linterprtation de Martin Heidegger (Ingeborg Schssler), Cassirer, double lecteur de Platon? Lhistorien de la philosophie et lpistmologue (Nathalie Janz), and Platon, anctre du totalitarisme? Quelques interprtations contemporaines (J.-J. Wunenburger). However many Socrateses there are, there are still more Platos, and no doubt (or certainly, if Sarah Kosman is right) still more to come.

Carl Joachim Classen (Aristipp und seine Anhnger in Rom), P.H. Schrijvers (Lucretius on the origin and development of political life (De rerum natura 5.1105-1160)), H.B. Gottschalk, Philosophical innovation in Lucretius?), Brad Inwood (L oikeisis sociale chez Epictte), Teun Tieleman (The hunt for Galens shadow: Alexander of Aprhrodisias, De anima 94.7-100.17 Bruns reconsidered), Pierluigi Donini (Doti naturali, abitudini e carattere nel De fato di Alessandro), Pieter van der Horst (A simple philosophy: Alexander of Lycopolis on Christianity), Han Baltussen (A dialectical argument in De anima A4: on Aristotles use of topoi in systematic contexts, and William Calder (Drei Briefe Wilhelm Diltheys an Ulrich von WilamowitzMoellendorff (1908-1910)). 30 Ada Neschke-Hentschke (ed., with Alexandre Etienne), Images de Platon et lectures de ses oeuvres. Les interprtations de Platon travers les sicles (Bibliothque philosophique to Louvain, 48). ditions de lInstitut Suprieur de Philosophie/ditions Peeters, Louvain/Paris, 1997. pp. xxiii + 468. Paperback: 2500 BEF. ISBN 90 6831 879 9 (Peeters Leuven), 2 87723 305 7 (Peeters France).