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  3. Cambridge Studies in the Dialogues of Plato

Plato's dialogues are rich mixtures of subtle argument, sublime theorising and superb literature. It is tempting to read them piecemeal - by analysing the arguments, by espousing or rejecting the theories or by praising Plato's literary expertise. It is equally tempting to search for Platonic views across dialogues, selecting passages from throughout the Platonic corpus. But Plato offers us the dialogues to read whole and one by one. This series provides original studies in individual dialogues of Plato. Each study will aim to throw light on such questions as why its chosen dialogue is composed in the complex way that it is, and what makes this unified whole more than the sum of its parts. In so doing, each volume will both give a full account of its dialogue and offer a view of Plato's philosophising from that perspective.

  • General Editors: Mary Margaret McCabe, King's College London

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4 results in Cambridge Studies in the Dialogues of Plato

Plato's Charmides
  • Raphael Woolf
  • Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023
  • Plato's Charmides is a rich mix of drama and argument. Raphael Woolf offers a comprehensive interpretation of its disparate elements that pays close attention to its complex and layered structure, and to the methodology of reading Plato. He thus aims to present a compelling and unified interpretation of the dialogue as a whole. The book mounts a strong case for the formal separation of Plato the author from his character Socrates, and for the Charmides as a Platonic defence of the written text as a medium for philosophical reflection. It lays greater emphasis than other readings on the centrality of eros to an understanding of Socratic procedure in the Charmides, and on how the dialogue's erotic and medical motifs work together. The book's critical engagement with the dialogue allows a worked-out account to be given of how temperance, the central object of enquiry in the work, is to be conceived.

Plato's Meno
  • Dominic Scott
  • Published online:
    29 September 2009
    Print publication:
    16 February 2006
  • Given its brevity, Plato's Meno covers an astonishingly wide array of topics: politics, education, virtue, definition, philosophical method, mathematics, the nature and acquisition of knowledge and immortality. Its treatment of these, though profound, is tantalisingly short, leaving the reader with many unresolved questions. This book confronts the dialogue's many enigmas and attempts to solve them in a way that is both lucid and sympathetic to Plato's philosophy. Reading the dialogue as a whole, it explains how different arguments are related to one another and how the interplay between characters is connected to the philosophical content of the work. In a new departure, this book's exploration focuses primarily on the content and coherence of the dialogue in its own right and not merely in the context of other dialogues, making it required reading for all students of Plato, be they from the world of classics or philosophy.

Plato's Cratylus
  • David Sedley
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    06 November 2003
  • Plato's Cratylus is a brilliant but enigmatic dialogue. It bears on a topic, the relation of language to knowledge, which has never ceased to be of central philosophical importance, but tackles it in ways which at times look alien to us. In this reappraisal of the dialogue, Professor Sedley argues that the etymologies which take up well over half of it are not an embarrassing lapse or semi-private joke on Plato's part. On the contrary, if taken seriously as they should be, they are the key to understanding both the dialogue itself and Plato's linguistic philosophy more broadly. The book's main argument is so formulated as to be intelligible to readers with no knowledge of Greek, and will have a significant impact both on the study of Plato and on the history of linguistic thought.

Plato's Lysis
  • Terry Penner, Christopher Rowe
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    20 October 2005
  • The Lysis is one of Plato's most engaging but also puzzling dialogues; it has often been regarded, in the modern period, as a philosophical failure. The full philosophical and literary exploration of the dialogue illustrates how it in fact provides a systematic and coherent, if incomplete, account of a special theory about, and special explanation of, human desire and action. Furthermore, it shows how that theory and explanation are fundamental to a whole range of other Platonic dialogues and indeed to the understanding of the corpus as a whole. Part One offers an analysis of, or running commentary on, the dialogue. In Part Two Professors Penner and Rowe examine the philosophical and methodological implications of the argument uncovered by the analysis. The whole is rounded off by an epilogue of the relation between the Lysis and some other Platonic (and Aristotelian) texts.