Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues Gerald A. Press Catherine H. Zuckert. Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. viii + 888. Cloth, $45.00. For most of the twentieth century, interpreters of Plato took little interest in the dramatic aspects of the dialogues, assumed Plato's teachings were directly expressed by their leading speakers, and sought to understand prima facie absences and inconsistencies among apparent teachings through a developmental picture of Plato's thought. Rarely did they explain why Plato occasionally used philosophical characters as different from each other and from Socrates as Parmenides, Timaeus, and the Eleatic Stranger, leaving Socrates present but largely silent. Nor did they address why, having returned Socrates to leadership in the "late" Philebus, Plato eliminated him altogether in favor of an Athenian Stranger in the Laws, taken as his latest dialogue. Platonic developmentalism has been receding for twenty years, but few interpreters have considered these other characters apart from the unsubstantiated and vague assumption that they all somehow speak for Plato. [End Page 133] Catherine Zuckert offers here "a new framework in which to view the corpus as a whole" (47). She coordinates a quite different arrangement of dialogues with an interpretation of Plato's philosophizing as unchangingly represented by an intellectually developing Socrates whose professional status and practices align with the contemporary history of Athens, and with Plato's other philosophers and the evident differences among them in substance and style. Zuckert's arrangement of the dialogues in their dramatic order roughly follows that of Eduard Munk (Die natürliche Ordnung der platonischen Schriften [1857]) and far surpasses earlier sketches by Brumbaugh (1964) and Cropsey (1995). In terms of older divisions within Platonic scholarship, she is a unitarian, but non-dogmatic. Her Socrates remains Plato's ideal philosopher, and he remains committed to a hierarchical view of purely intelligible realities, but he does not claim to possess or impart knowledge of it. Zuckert's Socratic philosophy is neither dogmatic nor skeptical, but better than the alternatives on offer precisely in its more limited intellectual and political pretensions and more nuanced understanding of human desire. The introduction defines her goal to interpret arguments in their literary forms and dramatic and historical contexts, offers an initial portrait of Plato's other philosophers, and outlines the dramatic-historical framework for the remainder of the volume. Zuckert takes the Laws as Plato's first dialogue dramatically and the Athenian Stranger as a Pre-Socratic philosophical figure (chapter 1), establishing the quest for an all-encompassing, intelligible order and the nature of human happiness as the twin problems on which Plato and his Socrates will remain focused. In the first stage of his philosophic development, Socrates proposes a speculative theory of ideas to solve these problems that is soundly criticized by Parmenides, whose own view, however, leads to self-contradiction (chapter 2). Parts of Apology, Symposium, and Phaedo show retrospectively the steps by which the young Socrates of the Parmenides became the mature Socrates of dramatically later dialogues (chapter 3), his turning to the study of words and learning the nature and importance of human desire. In the Protagoras, Alcibiades I, Charmides, Laches, Hippias Major and Minor, set during the early Peloponnesian War, this younger Socrates shows his contemporaries the incoherence of their views and encourages them to pursue philosophy with him, but has no positive views to offer (chapter 4). In the second stage, Symposium, Phaedrus, Clitophon, Republic, and Philebus (chapter 5), set during the later Peloponnesian War, Socrates presents "a kind of positive teaching . . . a vision" (14); but it depends heavily on images, in contrast with the counter-Socratic model represented by Timaeus's lecture on cosmology (chapter 6). The Theages, Euthydemus, Lysis, Gorgias, and Meno, set in the last decade of Socrates's life, give us the philosophic and political practice of a Socrates who has become well known, dealing with followers and temporary associates, still without a coherent account of the whole, but still committed to the search for wisdom. Stage four is constituted by the eight dialogues around Socrates's trial and death. The Theaetetus, Euthyphro, and Cratylus argue for the...