Abstract
Abstract Traditional and contemporary Anglo-American Platonic scholarship relies heavily on two assumptions. The first is that the Platonic dialogues contain Plato’s philosophical views. The second is that his views discernibly changed as he moved from his early, ‘Socratic’ period to his middle period. These hermeneutical positions have acquired the unattractive labels ‘dogmatism’ and ‘developmentalism’. The term ‘dogmatism’ is particularly unhappy. The idea is not that Plato held views dogmatically but that he held views (δ6γµατα) which he advanced in the dialogues. Developmentalism is a comparatively recent phenomenon. It originated in the early nineteenth century with K. F. Hermann, the first to identify a ‘Socratic’ period in the Platonic corpus and to interpret the dialogues that followed as charting Plato’s philosophical evolution.
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