Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Plato
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions
- The Cambridge Companion to Plato
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction to the Study of Plato
- 2 Plato in his Context
- 3 Stylometry and Chronology
- 4 Plato’s Socrates and his Conception of Philosophy
- 5 Being Good at Being Bad: Plato’s Hippias Minor
- 6 Inquiry in the Meno
- 7 Why Erōs?
- 8 Plato on Philosophy and the Mysteries
- 9 The Unfolding Account of Forms in the Phaedo
- 10 The Defense of Justice in Plato’s Republic
- 11 Plato on Poetic Creativity: A Revision
- 12 Betwixt and Between: Plato and the Objects of Mathematics
- 13 Another Goodbye to the Third Man
- 14 Plato’s Sophist on False Statements
- 15 Cosmology and Human Nature in the Timaeus
- 16. The Fourfold Classification and Socrates’ Craft Analogy in the Philebus
- 17 Law in Plato’s Late Politics
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- General Index
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions (continued from page iii)
3 - Stylometry and Chronology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to Plato
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions
- The Cambridge Companion to Plato
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction to the Study of Plato
- 2 Plato in his Context
- 3 Stylometry and Chronology
- 4 Plato’s Socrates and his Conception of Philosophy
- 5 Being Good at Being Bad: Plato’s Hippias Minor
- 6 Inquiry in the Meno
- 7 Why Erōs?
- 8 Plato on Philosophy and the Mysteries
- 9 The Unfolding Account of Forms in the Phaedo
- 10 The Defense of Justice in Plato’s Republic
- 11 Plato on Poetic Creativity: A Revision
- 12 Betwixt and Between: Plato and the Objects of Mathematics
- 13 Another Goodbye to the Third Man
- 14 Plato’s Sophist on False Statements
- 15 Cosmology and Human Nature in the Timaeus
- 16. The Fourfold Classification and Socrates’ Craft Analogy in the Philebus
- 17 Law in Plato’s Late Politics
- Bibliography
- Index Locorum
- General Index
- Other Volumes in the Series of Cambridge Companions (continued from page iii)
Summary
We have little information from external sources about the order in which Plato composed his dialogues. In the mid-nineteenth century, scholars began to study stylistic affinities among certain groups of dialogues, conjecturing that stylistically similar works were composed during the same period of Plato’s life. A consensus among scholars working independently of each other emerged, according to which the Sophist, Politicus, Philebus, Timaeus, Critias, and Laws were placed in a discrete chronological group – thought to be late, in part because we have external evidence that Laws is a late work. In recent decades, computer analysis has aided the investigation of Plato’s word choice and style. These studies can also address long-standing doubts about the authenticity of some works attributed to Plato, including his Letters. Using a variety of techniques, the Republic, Parmenides, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus can also be put into a chronological group that comes before the late dialogues but after the other dialogues. Some scholars have sought to use stylometric measures to sort the earlier dialogues, but there is not much basis for any such arrangement.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Plato , pp. 82 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022