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Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues

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Prof. Zuckert offers in this amazing piece of scholarship a full review of Plato's Dialogues, from the perspective of their literary setting. The author's hermeneutical commitment is clear: A single dialogue can only be interpreted against the background of the complete set of Plato's Dialogues. And the entire collection of Plato's Dialogues cannot be understood based on compositional criteria, according to which there would be juvenile, transitional, mature, critical and old-age dialogues. Instead Zuckert follows the trend established by authors like Jacob Howland and Drew A. Hyland that reads the Dialogues in the dramatological order derived from their literary contents. However, Zuckert goes farther than previous scholars and proposes a comprehensive reading of the whole corpus. This reading makes manifest the originating motives of Socrates' engagement with philosophy, how it developed itself through successive stages, and what limits had eventually to confront. The table of contents can offer a glimpse of the wide scope and deep scholarship of this book.

Introduction: Platonic dramatology (1)

Part I: The political and philosophical problems (49)

1. Using Pre-Socratic philosophy to support political reform. The Athenian Stranger (51)

2. Plato's Parmenides: Parmenides' critique of Socrates and Plato's critique of Parmenides (147)

3. Becoming Socrates (180)

4. Socrates interrogates his contemporaries about the noble and good (215)

Part II: Two paradigms of philosophy (279)

5. Socrates' positive teaching (281)

6. Timaeus-Critias: Completing or challenging Socratic political philosophy? (420)

7. Socratic practice (482)

Conclusion to Part II: What the contrast with Timaeus tells us about Socrates (586)

Part III: The trial and death of Socrates (593)

8. The limits of human intelligence (595)

9. The Eleatic challenge (680)

10. The trial and death of Socrates (736)

Conclusion: Why Plato made Socrates his hero (815)

Bibliography (863)

Index (881)

You'd think that after 24 centuries there might not be a whole lot of new things to say about Plato, but Zuckert makes startling discoveries about the Platonic corpus that everyone else seems to have overlooked. The first bombshell is that chronologically (in terms of when it was supposed to take place) Laws is the very first dialogue, not the last as many scholars have assumed. Since there's no mention of the Peloponnesian War, it must take place before 431, and in fact a close look shows that the Athenian Stranger's views are all rooted in pre-Socratic philosophy. Zuckert's clear, detailed, well substantiated argument about Laws got me hooked, and I ended up reading the entire 862 pages with interest and enjoyment--at the same time going over many of Plato's dialogues again.

Having read several essays on Plato by Leo Strauss, Zuckert's teacher, and his other followers, I was familiar with the idea that the argument of each dialogue emerges in tandem with the unfolding of the action, as well as the idea that the narrative structure (narrated by Socrates, told by a third person, not narrated, etc.) is related to the theme. Zuckert's approach, encompassing as it does the entire corpus, also makes clear the significance of the dramatic dates. For example, when we see that Lysis takes place years after Symposium and Phaedrus, we find that it "contains a critique of both the definitions of love presented in the two earlier dialogues" (p. 511). So what has sometimes been pigeonholed as a "minor" dialogue comes alive in the discussion of an important topic.

By looking at the dialogues in sequence we get a better sense of who Socrates is and how his thought developed (according to Plato, of course): the stripling struggling with Parmenides; the brash young man taking Protagoras down a couple notches with his hard questions; the confident thinker expounding a positive teaching in Symposium and Republic; the father figure seeking to benefit Theages and Meno; and finally the wise man facing his biological and intellectual limits in the dialogues around the time of the trial. The dialogues featuring Timaeus and the Eleatic philosopher offer contrasts that help us understand more deeply what Socrates is all about.

Although Zuckert follows in the footsteps of Strauss, who wrote that each of Plato's dialogues had to be understood in the context of the whole, she has a good grasp of the full gamut of research literature on Plato, not just Straussian, and a fine bibliography. Also unlike Strauss, she states what she thinks very clearly, and, moreover, in prose generally free of technical and academic terms. She is the worthy student of a great teacher, and this work marks an important new beginning in Platonic studies.