A Critique of the Standard Plato Reading

This paper criticizes the standard Plato reading strategy for its neglect of the form of Plato’s writings. The form of Plato’s writings is the dialogue form which he employed throughout his philosophical career. In this paper, we argue that no Plato reading is valid unless it takes into account this dialogue form. To this end, in the first part of the paper, we offer a very rough summary of the standard Plato reading with its three-part distinction between the dialogues according to their chronology, and then underline the strengths of this standard reading. In the second part, we qualify the standard Plato reading in light of, first, the persistent two-aspect character of Plato’s text, and, then, the consequent two trends of reading along the history of the reception of Plato’s philosophy. For this brief survey, we claim that the standard Plato reading is a dogmatic developmentalist reading. In light of this characterization, the third part draws out and criticizes the presuppositions of the standard Plato reading; generally speaking, we claim, first, that the standard reading starts out by imposing a model of pure rationality onto Plato’s texts, and, second, that it thereby blurs many important distinctions between different levels of discourse, dating criteria, and kinds of date. Since the paper’s criticism emphasizes the dialogue form in Platro’s writings, we point to three Platonic passages which suggest that the dialogue form should not be overlooked. Finally, the paper ends by defining three studies to supplement the present research