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Plato: The Man and His Work (Dover Books on Western Philosophy)

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In order to read Plato with some facility it is almost imperative to read a commentary a long with the Dialogues. A.E. Taylor is a true guide to what Plato actually says and provides useful classical context that will keep out the most egregious error. This is an essential volume in any philosopher's library.
One of the greatest thinkers of the ancient world, Plato instigated groundbreaking inquiries into morality, ethics, and the quest for happiness that continue to inform and influence philosophical discussion today. In this outstanding work of scholarship, a renowned expert on Plato presents a scrupulously accurate historical view of the great philosopher's life and works. Distinguished by its dispassionate scholarly analysis, Professor Taylor's discourse is refreshingly free of the biases that have frequently tainted other studies.
A brief introductory chapter acquaints readers with the known events of Plato's life. The author then proceeds to an illuminating examination of the philosopher's voluminous writings, including the minor Socratic dialogues, as well as such major works as Phaedo, Symposium, Protagoras, Republic, Phaedrus, Timaeus, Laws, and other influential dialogues. The final chapter, "Plato in the Academy," attempts to pin down?with the help of some of Plato's former students, such as Aristotle the philosopher's beliefs about numbers. In a substantial appendix, "The Platonic Apocrypha," Professor Taylor examines writings that have sometimes been attributed to Plato, including several letters, and offers cogent reasons for accepting or rejecting them as Plato's work.
Praised by Dean William R. Inge of Theology as "a great book, an honour to . . . British scholarship," this volume is an invaluable guide for students, teachers, and other readers interested in philosophy.

This review departs to some degree from the traditional amazon review. For those who are simply trying to decide whether to purchase this book or not I suggest ignoring my review and looking to the other reviews. I will list some of the pros and cons of this book as I see them but my review is aimed more towards those with a serious interest in Plato as opposed to those who are simply looking for a basic introduction to some of Plato's ideas.

I think Taylor's book is worth reading whatever camp you fall in (despite some flaws). If you are new to Plato and are just looking for an introduction this book is probably as good as any and if you are a serious Plato enthusiast Taylor is still worth reading despite being a bit dated.

I should also point out that I am not a Plato scholar so my review should be read as what it is: a review by a graduate student in philosophy with an interest in Plato but no real credentials.

The first pro of this book is that it is one of the only books that deals with every single Platonic dialogue (I know Catherine Zuckert's book Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues does as well but I have not read it yet). It is, therefore, good for anyone who is looking for analyses of some of the dialogues that are not treated as often in the secondary literature. This also allows A.E. Taylor to provide a unified portrait of the Platonic philosophy and to highlight themes which appear in all, or most, of the dialogues.

One con of Taylor's method, in my opinion, is that he attempts to follow a chronological reading of Plato based on stylometric dating. Personally I think that the attempts to date Plato's writings stylometrically are seriously flawed (there is some evidence that Plato continually reworked his dialogues throughout his life which would make any stylistic chronology impossible).

Unfortunately there is probably no other doctrine neutral way to date the Platonic dialogues (and any chronology based on doctrinal changes would wind up being circular). For the reader who is interested in this problem I suggest taking a look at the article "Re-reading Plato: the Problem of Platonic Chronology" by Jacob Howland. Not only does Howland argue that all attempts to provide a chronology of the Platonic corpus are seriously flawed but he also argues that this is not in anyway a hindrance since the interpretative method of reading the dialogues in conjunction with each other, so that they are each able to shed light on each other, tends to produce deeper and more interesting interpretations than the interpretations which attempt to determine the "development" of Plato's ideas based on a chronological reading. It might be helpful to give an example of what I mean. One of Plato's most famous doctrines is that knowledge is recollection. In the Phaedo Cebes describes this doctrine in this way, "According to this, [the doctrine that learning is recollection] we must at some previous time have learned what we now recollect. This is possible only if our soul existed somewhere before it took on this human shape. So according to this theory too, the soul is likely to be something immortal" (72e). Cebes takes the theory about learning being recollection to be a proof of the immortality of the soul. I have been told by those who read Greek that in this passage and the lines following Plato is contrasting and playing with the distinction between recollection (anamnesis) and memory (mneme) and that Cebes misunderstands recollection in terms of memory (something we have known at a previous time in a temporal sense rather than the a priori in the more modern sense). We can see this misunderstanding if we compare what Plato says about recollection in other dialogues. In the Phaedrus Socrates says, "a human being must understand speech in terms of general forms, proceeding to bring many perceptions together into a reasoned unity. That process is the recollection of the things our soul saw when it was traveling with god" (249c). Here we see that recollection is not the memory of things we saw in the past but rather the gathering of many perceptions under one common form. Plato, of course, still speaks of this mythically as 'when we were traveling with god' but it would be a mistake to take Plato's myths literally (it would take me too far afield to explain why I believe that). The point of all of this is that in order to pinpoint the mistake Cebes makes in regard to recollection as an error we have to read the dialogues together. We could say that the Phaedo is an earlier dialogue and that Plato changed his mind. But we have very little, if any, evidence for doing so (why could the Phaedo not be later than the Phaedrus in which case everything would be reversed) and we would have a much more impoverished understanding of a fundamental Platonic doctrine (the notion that learning is recollection); whereas if we read the dialogues together they are able to shed light on each other and give us a much fuller understanding of Platonic philosophy.

There is also some evidence that Plato himself composed the dialogues in terms of tetralogies and there is clearly a dramatic narrative tying many of the dialogues together. It seems more logical to me to read the dialogues in terms of the succession Plato himself devised rather than relying on a dubious chronology (I believe Zuckert follows this method in her book and Joseph Cropsey follows the same method in his book Plato's World: Man's Place in the Cosmos).

A.E. Taylor wrote this book at a time when it was still widely believed that we could make some fairly solid pronouncements about the chronology of the Platonic dialogues and this becomes a central part of Taylor's interpretations since he believes, "To understand a great thinker is, of course, impossible unless we know something of the relative order of his works" (pg16). While this is, I believe, a flaw of Taylor's method it is not a terribly serious one and I believe most of what he says about Plato does not depend for its validity on the validity of his chronology. This should not be a reason to entirely avoid Taylor, therefore, but should be kept in mind while reading.

Another con of Taylor's book, which is also a pro to some degree, is his tendency to read Plato anachronistically. There are two main ways in which he does this. The first is that he tends to read Plato in terms of Christianity, as for example, when he writes, "the ideal of Socrates and the Christian ideal are fundamentally identical" (pg192) or "The conception set before us in these pages is manifestly the Hellenic counterpart of the 'mystical way' of Christianity" (pg181). The good part about all this is that Taylor definitely recognizes a religious dimension to Plato's thought which is not always recognized by analytic interpretations of his philosophy but which is essential to a genuine understanding of Plato. When Plato claims that the objects of thought are the truly real in contrast to the objects of sense perception he is not simply devising a theory about predication, or the status of universals, and when he argues for the superiority of thought over sense-perception he is not simply making an epistemological argument about the sources of our knowledge. These doctrines are tied to what we might call a doctrine of salvation, or a doctrine about the ultimate human good. This becomes clear in the Phaedo where Plato argues, "the soul of every man, when it feels violent pleasure or pain in connection with some object, inevitably believes at the same time that what causes such feelings must be very clear and very true, which it is not...every pleasure and every pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together" (83c-e). Taylor recognizes this religious dimension in Plato which puts him above many analytic commentators on Plato (an analytic philosopher might abstract the arguments about the immortality of the soul from the Phaedo and attempt to determine their validity without recognizing the Phaedo as a dialogue about how the philosopher should live in order to achieve the ultimate human good). But ultimately I think Plato's ideas have more in common with his own religious context (Orphism, Pythagoreanism, and even, perhaps Indian religions) than they do with Christianity. Taylor's reading of Christian ideas back into Plato leads to at least some distortion (this statement has to be qualified to some degree since Christian writers incorporated a great many of Plato's insights into Christianity which is almost certainly the reason for the similarities that do exist between them but the problem arises when the similarities are reflected backwards rather than forwards, i.e. when Christianity is read back into Plato rather than Plato being read forward into Christianity).

The other way in which Taylor reads Plato anachronistically is the way he tends to see modern debates reflected in the debates taking place within Plato's dialogues (like the debate over the epiphenomenality of consciousness). In some ways it is good that Taylor reads current debates (at least current at the time Taylor was writing) back into Plato. It allows us to see the almost miraculous way Plato was able to anticipate nearly every important philosophical question in the entire history of Western philosophy.

And there is certainly nothing wrong with reading Plato in the light of our current concerns. I think one of the reasons Plato speaks to us today is because he was, in a way, living in a time analogous to our own. We often tend to think of Plato as living at the beginning of Greek civilization because our historical record becomes scanty as we move backwards from Plato (particularly in the dark ages after the Mycenaean collapse but before the classical age). But in reality Plato was closer to the end of Greek civilization. The Greek religions were losing their hold on young minds who were filled with new scientific ideas (one sees this in a number of the dialogues: one sees it in the Pythagoreans Simmias and Cebes in the Phaedo who are already ignorant of the religious aspects of the Pythagorean school to which they belong, one sees it in the new scientific explanations that are being offered for the old myths as in the story of Boreas in the Phaedrus, one sees it in the demands made for rational defenses of the superiority of justice in the Republic since the religious injunctions are losing some of their force.). We too live in an age where a religion which has existed for two thousand years is beginning to lose its hold to some degree in the face of new scientific ideas. Plato was such a giant, I think, because he held onto both ends of the chain at once. He did not entirely abandon the religious teachings of the past but he rescued them from their mythical form and presented them in a form that was acceptable to the more scientifically minded (perhaps we are waiting for something similar). For an example of what I mean we can again turn to the Phaedo where Plato has Socrates say, "It is likely that those who established the mystic rites for us were not inferior persons but were speaking in riddles long ago...There are indeed, as those concerned with the mysteries say, many who carry the thyrsus but the Bacchants are few. These latter are, in my opinion, no other than those who have practiced philosophy in the right way" (69c-d). Plato does not reject the old mystery religions outright - he merely rejects their literal interpretation (if the reader is interested in my personal opinion I think the modern atheists make the same mistake when rejecting Christianity that Plato seems to be arguing against in this passage- that is, they view Christianity as if it was just uttering nonsense rather than speaking in riddles which have to be deciphered - they think that when they have rejected the literal truth of the stories of the Bible, for example, that they have thereby refuted Christianity). I think that Taylor sees all of this fairly clearly as well and he is to be applauded for that.

But Taylor's method of reading Plato in terms of the subsequent history of philosophy, or of translating Plato's arguments and ideas into the terms of more modern philosophers is no longer the preferred method of reading Plato (for example, when he says that "for Socrates and Plato, no less than for Kant, immortality is a postulate of the 'practical' use of 'reason' (pg207), or, when he uses the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction in scholastic philosophy to explain arguments from the Phaedo (pg204)). These interpretations are not necessarily incorrect and certainly help the reader familiar with Kant and scholastic terminology to understand Plato's point but we can no longer assume that something as simple as the translation of Plato into Latin was in anyway 'innocent' or left the substance of Plato's theories intact. We can no longer simply read backward and assume that the tradition as it has been handed down to us, and which has been derived in large part from Plato, accurately represents Plato's own thought. I think Heidegger is largely responsible for awakening us in this regard because despite Heidegger's many flaws (both personal and philosophical) he really made an attempt to go back and read the Greeks on their own terms (before all the Greek terms had been translated into their Latin versions, and before the problems Plato was dealing with had been solidified in the tradition). Heidegger really is responsible for a revolution in the way we read Plato, at least in the Continental tradition, and Taylor's book seems a bit dated in comparison in my opinion. For the reader who is interested in some readings of Plato that I think are superior to Taylor's in this respect I would recommend Plato's Sophist (Studies in Continental Thought) by Martin Heidegger, Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues by John Sallis, Self-Knowledge in Plato's Phaedrus by Charles Griswold jr., Plato's Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul by Mitchell Miller jr., Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture Volume I: Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens by Werner Jaeger (the second volume is the volume on Plato but it will not let me link to it directly; just click on the little plus sign by the paperback version and it will expand and show all three volumes), and Order and History (Volume 3): Plato and Aristotle (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 16) by Eric Voegelin (I will be expanding this list very soon as I am currently in the middle of a graduate seminar on Plato).

As a final word I will simply repeat what I said at the beginning: despite the flaws of Taylor's book which I have attempted to spell out in this review I think his book is still worth reading. Taylor is a good writer, he gets a lot right, and many of his interpretations are very thought-provoking. I simply suggest that the reader keep some of the limitations of Taylor's book in mind while reading.

-Brian

If you want to understand Plato, I can heartily recommend a two-step process.

First, read up on him in Copleston's A History of Philosophy, Vol. 1: Greece and Rome From the Pre-Socratics to Plotinus. You would probably want to read about the pre-Socratics and the Sophists as well.

Then, get yourself a copy of this book, and go through it, dialogue by dialogue. I don't think you can go far wrong, and you will have a firm understanding of one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived --- well, two, if you count Socrates!

This book is 550 pages plus many footnotes which adds the equivalent of 20 or 30 more pages. It is not light reading lets put it that way. But if you can persevere and get through it you will learn a lot about Plato.

The emphasis is on 'the work' rather than 'the man'. Taylor recommended biographies by Grote, E. Meyer, and his hero Professor Burnet if you want those biographical details.

I read this book over an extended period of time while finishing quite a few other books in between. Having to read this book quickly like for a college class would in my opinion be a form of mental torture. There's too much information.

I had already read some of Plato's dialogues plus the Timaeus and Critias, The Republic, and The Laws. Taylor's book is a good review and overview of those plus many others although The Republic is only talked about at a high level.

Taylor saw three main phases of Plato's life:

1) early writings which include the Socratic dialogues and some other books
2) Academy period where writing slowed down a lot
3) later writings which include The Laws

The Socratic dialogues were apparently written to preserve information about Socrates and may have been based on actual conversations with Soc.

I still do not understand what the motivations were for executing Socrates. It sounds like he was feared by the authorities for some reason. This strange man chose to accept his execution rather than deny his principles even though he could have probably avoided it.

Taylor says that Plato viewed the doctrine of the forms as his unique contribution to philosophy. I did not gain an understanding of the forms from this book but it sounds like Aristotle's Metaphysics may provide this.

I'm most interested in the more mysterious and esoteric aspects of Plato's life and writings. However those are the very things that were never well known about Plato even during his lifetime.

According to the legends Plato traveled to Egypt and experienced the Egyptian initiation process at some level as had Pythagoras. During those experiences the initiates came into direct contact with the mythological gods.

I have read also that Plato was criticized by the other initiates for allowing some of what he heard in Egypt to make it into his writings. The initiates were sworn to secrecy and this type of information could become dangerous in the wrong hands. Perhaps The Parmenides contains some of those metaphysical secrets.

Taylor provides one of the stupider interpretations of Plato's misunderstood and often contradicted Atlantis story. Taylor says Plato used the story to talk about events that happened during his own lifetime and Plato was telling history in reverse. This is an example of how someone like Taylor will try to answer mysterious questions by referring to main stream, orthodox academic sources.

Even so it's hard to imagine how many books someone like Taylor must have read in his life.

Taylor held Plato in very high esteem and considered Plato to be a literary genius but I'm not sure exactly why.

Jeff Marzano

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