The origins of Platonic pedagogy: an introduction to the study of Minor Plato’s dialogues

Abstract

The article deals with the question of the ideological content of Plato’s “minor” dialogues and their significance for understanding Plato’s philosophy. The author sees his goal in showing that the traditionally low assessment of these works by Plato is unfair. Thus, the article provides analysis of the “minor” dialogues in terms of their role in the implementation of Plato’s educational strategies. Plato is affirmed never to separate the problems of philosophy and education because philosophy itself was understood by Plato as the education of the soul. The article proposes to consider “Minor Plato’s” dialogues as part of the Corpus Platonicum regardless of the solution to chronology and authenticity problems, since these dialogues in one way or another belong to the heritage of the Academy. The article analyzes two dialogues, Clitophon and Theages which are still little studied in Russian literature. The connections between the considered dialogues and the great works of Plato — Republic, Symposium, and Theaetetus —are revealed. The author comes to the conclusion that the relationship between these dialogues should be viewed as a “challenge-response” relationship in which the dialogues’ back-andforth occurs. It has been established that not only do Plato’s major dialogues contain answers to questions posed in Minor Plato’s dialogues, but, conversely, Clitophon and Theages become keys to understanding Symposium and Theaetetus. The article proves that Plato made this dialogues back-and-forth in order to achieve better understanding of his philosophical ideas by students.