Abstract
This paper defends a ‘perspectivist’ reading of Plato’s dialogues. According to this reading, each dialogue presents a particular and limited perspective on the truth, conditioned by the specific context, aim and characters, where this perspective, not claiming to represent the whole truth on a topic, is not incompatible with the possibly very different perspectives found in other dialogues nor, on the other hand, can be subordinated or assimilated to one of these other perspectives. This model is contrasted to the other models that have been proposed, i.e., Unitarianism, Developmentalism, and ‘Prolepticism’, and is shown to address and overcome the limitations of each. One major advantage of ‘perspectivism’ against the other interpretative models is that, unlike them, it can do full justice to the literary and dramatic character of the dialogues without falling into the opposite extreme of turning them into literary games with no positive philosophical content. To say that Plato’s dialogues are ‘perspectivist’ is not to say that they contain no ‘doctrines’ on the soul, for example, but, on the contrary, to stress the plurality of doctrines, with the observation that each is true within the limits of the argumentative function it is introduced to serve and of the specific dialogical context.
Highlights
In this paper I will defend a ‘perspectivist’ reading of Plato’s dialogues, though with some trepidation
Perspectivism has an affinity to Developmentalism in that the latter recognizes different perspectives on a topic or issue in different dialogues; the difference is that for Developmentalism each perspective is exclusive of the others and the different perspectives are to be interpreted as different views Plato took on a topic at different times
If we remain within the Republic, some have seen the psychology of Books 8-9 as being at odds with the tripartite division of Book 4.6 In Book 10 we get an indication of what the ‘longer way’ is when Socrates asserts that we could know the true nature of the soul only if we considered it in complete separation from the body (611b-612a)
Summary
That we can attribute to Plato the conception of truth and of logos assumed above will be defended below. In acknowledging that the account of the soul as tripartite is only a partial truth and far from a final or fully adequate account of the soul, we are only taking seriously Socrates’ own words: after first raising the question of whether or not the soul is tripartite, Socrates warns that they will never arrive at an accurate answer (ἱκανῶς) through the methods they are currently employing (435c9-d1). What they settle for is an account that is ‘sufficient’ (ἱκανῶς 435d6, ἐξαρκέσει 435d7) in the present moment (ἔν γε τῷ παρόντι, 435d5) and that is how we must understand what follows. The point is that these doctrines about the soul, understood as ‘perspectival’, are all partial and contextual truths, revealing within their clearly defined limits, and as such perfectly compatible, so that we do not need to speculate about which one is earlier or later.
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