 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Find us online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, In Dialogue, the life and writings of Plato. As faithful listeners will know by now, the earliest Greek philosophers were called the Presocratics. This time-honoured expression shows the extent to which Socrates is seen as the pivotal figure in the history of Greek philosophy. Yet some of Socrates' predecessors could claim to represent a turning point. How about Xenophanes with his rational skepticism towards traditional religion? Or Heraclitus, arguably the first man to be primarily a philosopher rather than an all-around polymath and scientist? And what about Parmenides, the first thinker to pursue a path of pure rational argument and the inventor of metaphysics? Of course, as Malcolm Schofield suggested in my interview with him, Socrates did add the new idea that philosophy is really about how to live. That conviction is not so popular nowadays, but was shared by all ancient philosophers after Socrates. Still, if Socrates is a transitional figure in Greek thought, it's maybe not so much because of his ideas, but rather because without Socrates, there would be no Plato. In fact, while I yield to no one in my admiration for Socrates and the Presocratics, I'm willing to say that it's with Plato that philosophy really gets going. The philosopher and logician Alfred North Whitehead famously remarked that the history of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. This has become such a cliché that I thought I'd get it out of the way right at the start of my first podcast on Plato. But cliché or no, Whitehead had a point. Philosophy did not begin or end with Plato, but it did come of age with Plato. Many central issues of philosophy are found for the first time in Plato, such as the nature of language or the immortality of the soul. But Plato wasn't only a philosophical genius, he was also a literary genius. The Greeks admired him as one of the foremost stylists of Attic Greek, and even in translation he is one of the philosophers who is most pleasurable to read. In the Platonic dialogues we can find everything we expect from great literature. Suspense, humour, foreshadowing, symbolism, subtle allusions to other texts, and of course, memorable characters. Socrates is Plato's most enduring literary creation, but Plato was a brilliant mimic, able to produce scintillating parodies of historical figures like Protagoras and Aristophanes. In many cases his mimicry is so compelling that it becomes almost impossible to imagine the historical person separately from the Platonic portrayal. As we've seen, that's certainly the case with Socrates. As for Plato himself, he remains elusive. He is removed from us not only by almost two and a half millennia, but also by his choice to write dialogues. I've mentioned before that in one of those dialogues, the Phaedo, a character remarks that Plato was not present at Socrates's death because he was ill. This passage reminds us that Plato is in a way absent in every dialogue. Plato never made himself a character in one of his dialogues, and he never wrote philosophy in anything other than dialogue form. He does not speak to us directly, which leaves us wondering which if any of the ideas expressed by Plato's characters represent his own views. In many cases it's almost irresistible to think that Plato is using one or another character as the mouthpiece for his own ideas. But just take the case of Plato's most famous doctrine, the theory of forms. It turns out to be surprisingly difficult to find passages in Plato's dialogues where this theory is expounded and defended. In fact, one of the few explicit discussions of the forms is immediately followed by a powerful and unanswered series of objections to Plato's own theory. More on this in later episodes. For now I want to say a little bit more about the man himself. Who was this elusive genius I've been describing in such rapturous terms? Well let's start with some basics. Born in 427 BC and dying in 347 BC, Plato hailed from Athens. Indeed, he could supposedly count among his ancestors the great lawgiver of Athens, Solon. The central event in Plato's own life was, we can safely assume, his encounter with Socrates, when he was still a young man. Socrates was put to death in 399 BC, when Plato was almost 30 years old. But Socrates must have made a big impression on the young Plato, enough for Plato to make Socrates the main character in most of his dialogues. After Socrates's death, Plato spent time away from Athens in southern Italy, where he could have encountered Pythagorean ideas, a further source of inspiration. But one shouldn't exaggerate the importance of this, I think. Plato's dialogues show that he had a wide knowledge of most of the pre-Socratics. He was especially interested in Heraclitus and Parmenides, who were at least as important for him as Pythagoras. An ancient tradition tries to convince us that Plato is really an inheritor of higher Pythagorean truths, but in fact Pythagoreanism was only one of the many strands of Greek philosophy up until Plato's time, and Plato wove his cloth from all the strands he could find. After his foreign travels, Plato returned to Athens and set himself up as the head of a philosophical school. The school was situated in a grove outside the city, the Akademia, named in honor of a mythical Greek hero. This of course is where we get our word, academy. Plato and his colleagues engaged not only in the pursuits we would think of as properly philosophical, but also practiced dialectical reasoning and argument, classification and division, and mathematics. You may have heard the legend that a sign at the entrance to the academy said, let no man enter who has not studied geometry, and indeed it's clear from the dialogues themselves that Plato had a deep interest in mathematics. He also had colleagues who did serious mathematical research, in particular Archytas, a Pythagorean philosopher. Another contemporary was Isocrates, not to be confused with Socrates. Isocrates was a brilliant rhetorician, and heir to the sophistical tradition Socrates had confronted in the 5th century. As we'll be seeing, Plato devotes a lot of attention to the question of rhetoric, and Isocrates may be one of his targets. But of course Plato's most famous contemporary apart from Socrates will be his own student Aristotle, who learned his trade at the academy before setting up his own rival school after Plato's death. As with other famous ancient philosophers, we can get some further information about Plato from a collection of biographies written by an author of the early 3rd century AD, Diogenes Laertius. Diogenes tells us that the name Plato was actually a nickname. It relates to the Greek platus, which means broad or wide. Supposedly Plato got his name because he was so well built, being an accomplished wrestler. Alternatively, Diogenes adds, it may have been because of the breadth of Plato's knowledge, or more mundanely because Plato had a wide forehead. Whatever the reason for the nickname, we should be grateful to whoever came up with it. Plato's real name was Aristocles, and it would be mighty confusing if the two leading ancient thinkers were called Aristocles and Aristotle. In terms of Plato's biography, the most important information in Diogenes concerns Plato's three visits to Syracuse in Sicily. We also have some letters, supposedly written by Plato himself, which discuss Plato's involvement in Sicilian politics. To make this long story fairly short, Plato went to Syracuse for the first time in the 380s BC when he was about 40 years old. Diogenes tells us that while he was there Plato criticized the way that the tyrant Dionysius was running his city. The tyrant became irate, as tyrants tend to do. He was tempted to have Plato put to death, but settled for having him sold into slavery. Plato was eventually ransomed and able to return to Athens. But he returned to Syracuse to meet with the tyrant's son and namesake, Dionysius, when the young man inherited his father's position. Plato hoped to persuade this young tyrant to adopt philosophy and rule with justice and by the laws rather than through violence and fear. Unfortunately this trip too was a failure. Plato and a friend of his named Dion were sent packing. Plato made a third and final trip to Syracuse for the sake of getting the tyrant Dionysius to look more favorably on his friend Dion. Yet again Plato's mission failed. In due course the exiled Dion returned to Sicily with an invading army. Dion deposed Dionysius, but was murdered. The whole sorry tale provides a striking example of a philosopher trying and failing to exert influence in real-world politics. I suppose some readers have found some amusement in Plato's ineffectual idealism, his hope of turning the young Dionysius into one of the philosopher kings from the Republic. But I'm always happy to speak up for Plato, so I say we should commend him for trying to put his theories into practice rather than just sitting around in the academy writing dialogues and doing mathematics. The most famous passage in Plato's letters discusses the younger tyrant Dionysius. It appears in the so-called seventh letter, which, like the other letters, may not be by Plato. The passage discusses a rumor that the young tyrant Dionysius tried his hand at writing some philosophy. The letter's author says that if Dionysius did write such a book then you can be sure that that book was not based on teachings that Plato delivered to him in Syracuse. Any good philosopher knows that philosophy is not a body of doctrines which can be laid out by a teacher, so as to be ingested and then written out by the student. True philosophy consists in a discussion between teacher and pupil, and the insights one achieves in this way cannot just be stated in so many words. The author of the seventh letter gives a kind of metaphysical argument for this. Words are distant echoes or images of true reality, so that it is impossible to capture reality perfectly in language. Still worse is putting one's thoughts into writing rather than live speech, since the written words will inevitably be vulnerable to distortion and misunderstanding. As the real Plato says in one of his dialogues, the Phaedrus, written words cannot defend themselves, the way we can defend ourselves in conversation. Many readers are tempted to connect this passage in the seventh letter to the fact that Plato wrote dialogues instead of treatises full of doctrines. As I've said, Plato never speaks to us in his own voice. He is not one of the characters, he is the intelligence that lurks unseen behind the characters. Why did he write philosophy in this way? Diogenes, in his biography of Plato, says that Plato invented the use of dialogue form in writing philosophy, and he seems to be right about this. Perhaps some earlier philosophers like Parmenides' student Zeno had written in the form of opposed arguments, but Plato was original in using the form of dramatically realistic, literary dialogues with vivid characters taken from real life. The seventh letter, if it really is by Plato, would help to explain this choice. The letter suggests that Plato didn't think it was possible to state philosophical truth in a book, hence his preference for dialogues over didactic treatises. Alternatively, Plato may have thought that, although it is possible to state philosophical truth in theory, in practice he was unable to do so. Perhaps he was always working through his ideas and never reached a doctrine that satisfied him. Then again, maybe Plato was perfectly confident of his insights, but worried about the vulnerability of words, especially written words. As we just saw, in face-to-face discussion one can explain oneself, respond to criticism, clear up confusions, and so on, but written words are like orphans at the mercy of the reader who comes along and finds them. In any case, it seems plausible that for Plato, philosophy occurs above all in discussions, not written works. When he did put pen to papyrus, he sought to recreate this context on the page. I think we can go further if we consider what it is like to read a Platonic dialogue. The dialogues are entertaining, but they can also be frustrating. Why are the people talking to Socrates, his interlocutors, letting him get away with apparently bad arguments? Why aren't they asking him to explain certain points more fully? Above all, why do so many dialogues end in a frustrating impasse, with Socrates and his interlocutors agreeing that they haven't achieved any insight into the topic at hand? These stalemate endings no doubt relate to Socrates' admission of ignorance. He knows only that he does not know. But Plato isn't telling us to settle for ignorance, even Socratic ignorance. When the participants in the dialogue overlook important objections or fail to explore seemingly obvious avenues of inquiry, we are meant to notice. He wants his readers to engage actively with his dialogues. The reader should be alert to spot those overlooked alternatives, to see that some solutions are only being hinted at. You might say that the written text is one partner in a further dialogue, a dialogue between the reader and the text. This also would help to explain why Plato's dialogues are so literary. By this I mean not only that they are beautifully written, though they frequently are, but that Plato deploys a full arsenal of allusions, metaphors, and cross-references such as we might expect from a novelist or playwright. This again invites the reader to think about the subtext as well as the surface meaning of the dialogue. The dramatic bits of stage-setting that surround Plato's philosophical arguments are as important as the arguments themselves. He might for instance show us his characters exhibiting or not exhibiting a virtue like courage in the very way that they pursue a philosophical discussion about virtue. Similarly, Plato set dialogues about piety and respect for the law within days of Socrates' execution. We should read these dialogues with Socrates' fate in mind. And in general, we should read Plato both as literature and as philosophy. Having said all this, I don't think that there is a single general explanation for why Plato wrote dialogues. He seems to have seen many possible advantages in the dialogue form, and to have exploited different advantages in different works. Consider a short dialogue like the Euthyphro, in which the title character is shown by Socrates to be unable to define piety. This and other so-called Socratic dialogues are very different from the much longer and more complex Republic, which still uses Socrates as the main character, but in a more didactic mode, as he lays out theories about knowledge, forms, the soul, and politics. Both dialogues are intensely literary, with strong and memorable characters in addition to their philosophical content. But it would be foolish to assume that the Republic is simply a much longer attempt to do the sort of thing Plato was trying to do in the Euthyphro. So we shouldn't ask only why Plato wrote dialogues, but also how he used the dialogue form for different effects. This brings us to the more basic issue of how many dialogues there are. Collections of Plato's works go back to the first century AD, when a man named Thrasyllus produced an edition of the dialogues. His edition divided 35 dialogues plus the Platonic letters as a final text into nine groups of four. These were the works Thrasyllus himself thought were really by Plato. But we nowadays accept only between 25 or 30 dialogues as being authentic. Several of the dialogues, like the Platonic letters, are of uncertain authenticity, and others are agreed by everyone to be forgeries. Also, Thrasyllus's division of the dialogues into groups of four has been abandoned. Instead, scholars now usually group the dialogues into early, middle, and late. According to this division, Plato began writing his dialogues in the shadow of Socrates's execution. The dialogues he wrote in this early period adhered more or less closely to Socrates's actual practice and discussion. As I've mentioned, they usually end with an impasse. In Greek the word is aporia, where everyone in the dialogue agrees that they can't answer the question at hand. The Euthyphro is an example. The question of the dialogue is, what is piety? Some suggestions are made and shot down, and Socrates and Euthyphro part company without having successfully defined piety. These are the early, or Socratic, dialogues. Then comes the middle period, during which Plato wrote more ambitious, longer works and moved away from representing typical Socratic encounters. The Republic, Plato's best-known dialogue, is the main work of this period. Finally, there are the late works. We know that a hugely long and, most readers tend to feel, hugely boring work called the Laws was not yet completed when Plato died, so this was his very last work. Other late works tend to be more technical and less dramatic in their setting. Often there is one lead character who controls the discussion by taking advantage of an interlocutor who doesn't give him much trouble. In many dialogues of this later period, Plato removes Socrates from center stage and allows other characters to take the leading roles. Now how true is this story about the three periods of Plato's career? Well, some dialogues refer forwards or backwards to others, which is a hint of relative chronology. Some scholars have also analyzed Plato's evolving writing style to put the various dialogues in order. These indications tend to confirm a very rough version of the scheme I just described. So we can say with some confidence that, for example, most of the so-called Socratic dialogues are earlier than the Republic. Still, there is no general agreement about the exact chronological order of the dialogues. And even if we did know the order in which the dialogues were written, it's not clear what this would mean for our understanding of Plato's ideas. Even if we accept the idea that Plato's views evolved over time, that doesn't mean the evolution was a simple one. Plato was a self-critical philosopher and liked to explore the same problems from numerous angles. No doubt he did change his mind to consider objections to ideas he'd discussed earlier and so on, but there are no simple trajectories along which Plato's mind traveled over the course of his career. A much better way to read Plato is one dialogue at a time. Every dialogue is a world unto itself and should be considered on its own before bringing it into relation with other dialogues. This is true not only of a long, famous dialogue such as the Republic, but also of shorter and lesser-known dialogues. Next time I'll be introducing Plato further by considering two such dialogues. These two works are not on the reading list of many undergraduate courses, but will introduce us to many of the themes that are central to Plato's writings—his humor, his rivalry with the sophists, his fascination with the erotic, his puzzlement over the nature of knowledge. I won't yet reveal which dialogues I have in mind, but here's a hint. In one dialogue Socrates squares off against a pair of pugilistic brothers, and in the other he tries to cure a young man's headache. That's two unloved dialogues. This week on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.