How many platonic dialogues

Plato works from those ideas and methodology he inherits from Socrates and then devises his own unique set of ideas and further develops the dialectical method of reasoning, which he learned from Socrates. Below is a breakdown of the Dialogues into five different categories or periods. In each group are those dialogues that appear to have been written with intent different from that of the other periods. In this course we shall see the progression throughout the first three periods.

Chronological Listing. The links are to translations by Benjamin Jowett. The defense of Socrates from the charges of impiety and corruption of youth. Phaedo envisaged or begun but completed later. The defense of Socrates from the charge of being a Sophist and having an Amoral character. He recalls a recurring dream he has had, in which he is exhorted: "Socrates, practice and cultivate the arts.

He argues against suicide to Cebes, saying we are put in a sort of guard post and that the gods are our keepers and we their possessions, and we will be punished if we destroy ourselves. The senses are inaccurate. The soul finds truth, not with the senses, but through pure thought and reflection divorced from the senses.

The intellect can contemplate absolute truths such as "absolute uprightness. We must separate ourselves from these urges to attain pure knowledge. Pure knowledge may only come from the purification of death. Philosophers make their occupation the freeing and separation of soul from body. The courage and self-control non-philosophers display are based merely on fear of losing pleasures.

Wisdom must be the ultimate goal of life--it makes possible true courage, self-control, and integrity. Socrates looks forward to being dead, as his soul will be able to mix with past rulers and great thinkers. But Cebes is skeptical about the afterlife and the persistence of the soul--he wonders if the soul does not merely disperse at death and no longer exists.

Socrates considers the question whether souls transmigrate, and recounts the legend that they do in fact return from the dead. He provides an elaborate argument about opposites begetting opposites, that death and life are opposites, and that death must therefore beget life rebirth or palligenesia--this argument seems to be based on a fallacious assumption!

He believes souls return from the world of the dead and that "what we recollect now we must have learned at some time before," and that "learning is recollection" or recovery of knowledge formerly known but temporarily forgotten after birth.

This recollection or anamnesis occurs when questions are asked in just the right way. For example, we have a built-in knowledge of absolute equality. Cebes remains unconvinced, arguing that we may indeed recall previously forgotten knowledge, but that does not prove the soul lives on after death.

Socrates presents another elaborate argument based on composite objects, and that which is invisible being invariant, etc. The body confuses the soul. Upon death, "it [the soul] passes into the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless The soul is like that which is divine, indissoluble, invariable.

The soul of a good man who has led a pure life goes " It is a happy fate, released from uncertainty and fears. But the souls of the wicked or impure are "compelled to wander about these places [on earth] as punishment Or because of their craving for the corporeal, they may be reincarnated as base animals such as the donkey. No soul which has not practiced philosophy, and is not absolutely pure when it leaves the body, may attain to the divine nature; that is only for the lover of wisdom.

Philosophy sets the soul free, rid of human ills. Pleasure and pain are impure, corporeal, and bind the soul like rivets to the body.

Socrates compares his expression of joy at his impending death to that shown by the dying swan [the swan song], which sings most loudly and sweetly then in anticipation of going into the presence of the gods, and not as an expression of grief.

But Simmias is still unconvinced of the immortality of the soul. He addresses several concerns. Socrates loves to argue. He also refutes the concept of souls wearing out He acknowledges he in unsuited to pursue natural science.

He does not "understand how things becomes one, nor, in short, why anything else comes or ceases or continues to be, according to this method of inquiry. He distrusts observational sciences: "I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my senses I might blind my soul altogether" as can occur by watching an eclipse.

He gives his own theory of causation: "I am assuming the existence of absolute beauty and goodness Whatever else is beautiful apart from absolute beauty is beautiful because it partakes of that absolute beauty The one thing that makes that object beautiful is the presence in it or association with in it, in whatever way the relation comes about, of absolute beauty.

Socrates proves the immortality of the soul by claiming that absolute forms do not coexist with their opposites: the soul confers life, the opposite of life is death, thus the soul will not admit death and is therefore immortal. Souls are imperishable, but nonetheless must be cared for in life and for all time--the only escape from evil is becoming good.

Socrates describes his theory of the earth. The earth, if spherical, is in the middle of the heavens aether , and being suspended in equilibrium requires no force to keep it from falling. It is vast, and there are many hollow places in which water, mist, and air collect and in which we ordinary humans actually live, though we incorrectly believe we live on the surface and that the air we see about us is the true heavens.

The earth and stones we are surrounded by are corroded, not like the true earth and heaven, which are out of sight.

The idealized real earth has more vivid and extensive colors than what we experience, and the trees, flowers, mountains, stones, etc. Rich metals are abundant. Idealized humans live in the air beyond our sight , free from disease and superior in their senses to us. They have temples inhabited by gods and see the true sun, moon and stars as they really are. The hollows that we live in are interconnected by underground channels, subterranean rivers of water, mud, and lava, and these flows have a natural oscillation.

The largest cavity in the earth is Tartarus, into which all the great rivers flow and reemerge again in a type of oscillation accompanied by great winds. The great streams include: 1 the mightiest, Oceanus, 2 Acheron which arrives at the Acherusian Lake where the souls of the dead come , 3 Pryriphlegethon which belches forth jets of lava , and 4 the Cocytus river which forms the lake Styx in the Stygian region. The newly dead are submitted to judgement.

Those who lived a neutral life go to Acheron for purification and absolution from sins. The very wicked receive eternal punishment in Tartarus and never reemerge. Redeemable sinners stay in Tartarus for a year, then are borne by the river to the Acherusian Lake etc. But those who have lived holy lives "are released and set free from confinement in these regions of the earth, and passing upward to their pure abode, make their dwelling upon the earth's surface [i.

Living a life of self-control and goodness, courage, and liberality and truth is the way a man can be free from all anxiety about the fate of the soul. He should devote himself to the pleasures of acquiring knowledge. Crito asks if he has any words for his children, but he has no new advice.

He is indifferent to whether his body is buried or burned, since his soul will have departed it to a state of heavenly happiness. His 3 sons come in with the women of his household, and after speaking to them a short while asks them to go away.

His kindly jailer gives him praise, apologizes for having to carry out his orders, and leaves weeping. Crito wants him to delay as long as possible, but Socrates insists on proceeding with the execution. A servant fetches the cup of hemlock, which Socrates calmly and cheerfully drinks. He urges Apollodorus to cease his weeping and be brave, since he wishes to die in tranquility. He tells Crito they should offer a cock to the divine healer Asclepius as if he were recovering from an illness by dying.

Soon he dies. I am a lover of learning, and trees and open country won't teach me anything, whereas men in the town do. Phaedrus reads Lysias' speech, which describes how a handsome young man is tempted, not by the entreaty of a lover but by one who professes not to be in love, arguing that "a lover more often than not wants to possess you One is the innate desire for pleasure, the other an acquired judgment that aims us at what is best.

Sometimes these internal guides are in accord, sometimes at variance When judgment guides us rationally toward what is best, and has the mastery, that mastery is called temperance A man dominated by desire and enslaved to pleasure is of course bound to aim at getting the greatest possible pleasure out of his beloved He must aim at making the boy totally ignorant and totally dependent on his lover, by way of securing the maximum pleasure for himself, and the maximum of damage to the other.

But Socrates then maintains that love eros is a god or divine being and cannot therefore be evil. He cites Stesichorus' belief that love "is a gift of the gods," a heaven-sent form of madness or possession.

He argues that the soul is immortal and is like a chariot drawn by two differing steeds: "one of them is noble and good, When it is perfect and winged it journeys on high and controls the whole world, but one that has shed its wings sinks down until it can fasten on something solid, and settling there it takes itself an earthly body It is there that true being dwells, without color or shape, that cannot be touched; reason alone, the soul's pilot, can behold it, and all true knowledge is knowledgee thereof Contemplating truth she is nourished and prospers And while she is borne round she discerns justice He and he alone becomes truly perfect.

Standing aside from the busy doings of mankind, and drawing nigh to the divine, he is rebuked by the multitude as being out of his wits When he that loves beauty is touched by such madness he is called a lover Beauty it was ours to see in all its brightness in those days When a beloved causes desire in a lover, the driver of the chariot reins in the base horse "until the evil steed casts off his wantonness He makes no appearance in Laws , and there are several dialogues Sophist , Statesman , Timaeus in which his role is small and peripheral, while some other figure dominates the conversation or even, as in the Timaeus and Critias , presents a long and elaborate, continuous discourse of their own.

Plato's dialogues are not a static literary form; not only do his topics vary, not only do his speakers vary, but the role played by questions and answers is never the same from one dialogue to another. Symposium , for example, is a series of speeches, and there are also lengthy speeches in Apology , Menexenus , Protagoras , Crito , Phaedrus , Timaeus , and Critias ; in fact, one might reasonably question whether these works are properly called dialogues. The closest we come to an exception to this generalization is the seventh letter, which contains a brief section in which the author, Plato or someone pretending to be him, commits himself to several philosophical points—while insisting, at the same time, that no philosopher will write about the deepest matters, but will communicate his thoughts only in private discussion with selected individuals.

As noted above, the authenticity of Plato's letters is a matter of great controversy; and in any case, the author of the seventh letter declares his opposition to the writing of philosophical books. Whether Plato wrote it or not, it cannot be regarded as a philosophical treatise, and its author did not wish it to be so regarded. In all of his writings—except in the letters, if any of them are genuine—Plato never speaks to his audience directly and in his own voice.

Strictly speaking, he does not himself affirm anything in his dialogues; rather, it is the interlocutors in his dialogues who are made by Plato to do all of the affirming, doubting, questioning, arguing, and so on. Whatever he wishes to communicate to us is conveyed indirectly. This feature of Plato's works raises important questions about how they are to be read, and has led to considerable controversy among those who study his writings.

Since he does not himself affirm anything in any of his dialogues, can we ever be on secure ground in attributing a philosophical doctrine to him as opposed to one of his characters? Did he himself have philosophical convictions, and can we discover what they were? Or, if we attribute some view to Plato himself, are we being unfaithful to the spirit in which he intended the dialogues to be read?

Is his whole point, in refraining from writing treatises, to discourage the readers of his works from asking what their author believes and to encourage them instead simply to consider the plausibility or implausibility of what his characters are saying?

Is that why Plato wrote dialogues? If not for this reason, then what was his purpose in refraining from addressing his audience in a more direct way? There are other important questions about the particular shape his dialogues take: for example, why does Socrates play such a prominent role in so many of them, and why, in some of these works, does Socrates play a smaller role, or none at all? Once these questions are raised and their difficulty acknowledged, it is tempting, in reading Plato's works and reflecting upon them, to adopt a strategy of extreme caution.

Rather than commit oneself to any hypothesis about what he is trying to communicate to his readers, one might adopt a stance of neutrality about his intentions, and confine oneself to talking only about what is said by his dramatis personae. One cannot be faulted, for example, if one notes that, in Plato's Republic , Socrates argues that justice in the soul consists in each part of the soul doing its own.

It is equally correct to point out that other principal speakers in that work, Glaucon and Adeimantus, accept the arguments that Socrates gives for that definition of justice.

Perhaps there is no need for us to say more—to say, for example, that Plato himself agrees that this is how justice should be defined, or that Plato himself accepts the arguments that Socrates gives in support of this definition.

Should we not read his works for their intrinsic philosophical value, and not as tools to be used for entering into the mind of their author? We know what Plato's characters say—and isn't that all that we need, for the purpose of engaging with his works philosophically? But the fact that we know what Plato's characters say does not show that by refusing to entertain any hypotheses about what the author of these works is trying to communicate to his readers we can understand what those characters mean by what they say.

We should not lose sight of this obvious fact: it is Plato, not any of his dramatis personae , who is reaching out to a readership and trying to influence their beliefs and actions by means of his literary actions. When we ask whether an argument put forward by a character in Plato's works should be read as an effort to persuade us of its conclusion, or is better read as a revelation of how foolish that speaker is, we are asking about what Plato as author not that character is trying to lead us to believe, through the writing that he is presenting to our attention.

We need to interpret the work itself to find out what it, or Plato the author, is saying. Similarly, when we ask how a word that has several different senses is best understood, we are asking what Plato means to communicate to us through the speaker who uses that word.

We should not suppose that we can derive much philosophical value from Plato's writings if we refuse to entertain any thoughts about what use he intends us to make of the things his speakers say.

Penetrating the mind of Plato and comprehending what his interlocutors mean by what they say are not two separate tasks but one, and if we do not ask what his interlocutors mean by what they say, and what the dialogue itself indicates we should think about what they mean, we will not profit from reading his dialogues. Furthermore, the dialogues have certain characteristics that are most easily explained by supposing that Plato is using them as vehicles for inducing his readers to become convinced or more convinced than they already are of certain propositions—for example, that there are forms, that the soul is not corporeal, that knowledge can be acquired only by means of a study of the forms, and so on.

Why, after all, did Plato write so many works for example: Phaedo , Symposium , Republic , Phaedrus , Theaetetus , Sophist , Statesman , Timaeus , Philebus , Laws in which one character dominates the conversation often, but not always, Socrates and convinces the other speakers at times, after encountering initial resistance that they should accept or reject certain conclusions, on the basis of the arguments presented?

The only plausible way of answering that question is to say that these dialogues were intended by Plato to be devices by which he might induce the audience for which they are intended to reflect on and accept the arguments and conclusions offered by his principal interlocutor. The educative value of written texts is thus explicitly acknowledged by Plato's dominant speaker. If preludes can educate a whole citizenry that is prepared to learn from them, then surely Plato thinks that other sorts of written texts—for example, his own dialogues—can also serve an educative function.

This does not mean that Plato thinks that his readers can become wise simply by reading and studying his works. On the contrary, it is highly likely that he wanted all of his writings to be supplementary aids to philosophical conversation: in one of his works, he has Socrates warn his readers against relying solely on books, or taking them to be authoritative. They are, Socrates says, best used as devices that stimulate the readers' memory of discussions they have had Phaedrus ed.

In those face-to-face conversations with a knowledgeable leader, positions are taken, arguments are given, and conclusions are drawn. Plato's writings, he implies in this passage from Phaedrus , will work best when conversational seeds have already been sown for the arguments they contain.

If we take Plato to be trying to persuade us, in many of his works, to accept the conclusions arrived at by his principal interlocutors or to persuade us of the refutations of their opponents , we can easily explain why he so often chooses Socrates as the dominant speaker in his dialogues. Presumably the contemporary audience for whom Plato was writing included many of Socrates' admirers.

Furthermore, if Plato felt strongly indebted to Socrates for many of his philosophical techniques and ideas, that would give him further reason for assigning a dominant role to him in many of his works.

More about this in section Of course, there are other more speculative possible ways of explaining why Plato so often makes Socrates his principal speaker. But anyone who has read some of Plato's works will quickly recognize the utter implausibility of that alternative way of reading them. Plato could have written into his works clear signals to the reader that the arguments of Socrates do not work, and that his interlocutors are foolish to accept them.

But there are many signs in such works as Meno , Phaedo , Republic , and Phaedrus that point in the opposite direction. And the great admiration Plato feels for Socrates is also evident from his Apology. The reader is given every encouragement to believe that the reason why Socrates is successful in persuading his interlocutors on those occasions when he does succeed is that his arguments are powerful ones.

The reader, in other words, is being encouraged by the author to accept those arguments, if not as definitive then at least as highly arresting and deserving of careful and full positive consideration. When we interpret the dialogues in this way, we cannot escape the fact that we are entering into the mind of Plato, and attributing to him, their author, a positive evaluation of the arguments that his speakers present to each other. There is a further reason for entertaining hypotheses about what Plato intended and believed, and not merely confining ourselves to observations about what sorts of people his characters are and what they say to each other.

When we undertake a serious study of Plato, and go beyond reading just one of his works, we are inevitably confronted with the question of how we are to link the work we are currently reading with the many others that Plato composed.

Admittedly, many of his dialogues make a fresh start in their setting and their interlocutors: typically, Socrates encounters a group of people many of whom do not appear in any other work of Plato, and so, as an author, he needs to give his readers some indication of their character and social circumstances. But often Plato's characters make statements that would be difficult for readers to understand unless they had already read one or more of his other works.

For example, in Phaedo 73a-b , Socrates says that one argument for the immortality of the soul derives from the fact that when people are asked certain kinds of questions, and are aided with diagrams, they answer in a way that shows that they are not learning afresh from the diagrams or from information provided in the questions, but are drawing their knowledge of the answers from within themselves.

That remark would be of little worth for an audience that had not already read Meno. Several pages later, Socrates tells his interlocutors that his argument about our prior knowledge of equality itself the form of equality applies no less to other forms—to the beautiful, good, just, pious and to all the other things that are involved in their asking and answering of questions 75d.

Laches : what is courage? Charmides : What is moderation? Hippias Major : what is beauty? Evidently, Plato is assuming that readers of Phaedo have already read several of his other works, and will bring to bear on the current argument all of the lessons that they have learned from them.

In some of his writings, Plato's characters refer ahead to the continuation of their conversations on another day, or refer back to conversations they had recently: thus Plato signals to us that we should read Theaetetus , Sophist , and Statesman sequentially; and similarly, since the opening of Timaeus refers us back to Republic , Plato is indicating to his readers that they must seek some connection between these two works.

These features of the dialogues show Plato's awareness that he cannot entirely start from scratch in every work that he writes. He will introduce new ideas and raise fresh difficulties, but he will also expect his readers to have already familiarized themselves with the conversations held by the interlocutors of other dialogues—even when there is some alteration among those interlocutors.

Meno does not re-appear in Phaedo ; Timaeus was not among the interlocutors of Republic. Why does Plato have his dominant characters Socrates, the Eleatic visitor reaffirm some of the same points from one dialogue to another, and build on ideas that were made in earlier works? If the dialogues were merely meant as provocations to thought—mere exercises for the mind—there would be no need for Plato to identify his leading characters with a consistent and ever-developing doctrine.

For example, Socrates continues to maintain, over a large number of dialogues, that there are such things as forms—and there is no better explanation for this continuity than to suppose that Plato is recommending that doctrine to his readers.

Furthermore, when Socrates is replaced as the principal investigator by the visitor from Elea in Sophist and Statesman , the existence of forms continues to be taken for granted, and the visitor criticizes any conception of reality that excludes such incorporeal objects as souls and forms.

The Eleatic visitor, in other words, upholds a metaphysics that is, in many respects, like the one that Socrates is made to defend. Again, the best explanation for this continuity is that Plato is using both characters—Socrates and the Eleatic visitor—as devices for the presentation and defense of a doctrine that he embraces and wants his readers to embrace as well.

This way of reading Plato's dialogues does not presuppose that he never changes his mind about anything—that whatever any of his main interlocutors uphold in one dialogue will continue to be presupposed or affirmed elsewhere without alteration. It is, in fact, a difficult and delicate matter to determine, on the basis of our reading of the dialogues, whether Plato means to modify or reject in one dialogue what he has his main interlocutor affirm in some other.

One of the most intriguing and controversial questions about his treatment of the forms, for example, is whether he concedes that his conception of those abstract entities is vulnerable to criticism; and, if so, whether he revises some of the assumptions he had been making about them, or develops a more elaborate picture of them that allows him to respond to that criticism.

In Parmenides , the principal interlocutor not Socrates—he is here portrayed as a promising, young philosopher in need of further training—but rather the pre-Socratic from Elea who gives the dialogue its name: Parmenides subjects the forms to withering criticism, and then consents to conduct an inquiry into the nature of oneness that has no overt connection to his critique of the forms.

Does the discussion of oneness a baffling series of contradictions—or at any rate, propositions that seem, on the surface, to be contradictions in some way help address the problems raised about forms? That is one way of reading the dialogue. And if we do read it in this way, does that show that Plato has changed his mind about some of the ideas about forms he inserted into earlier dialogues?

It is not easy to say. But we cannot even raise this as an issue worth pondering unless we presuppose that behind the dialogues there stands a single mind that is using these writings as a way of hitting upon the truth, and of bringing that truth to the attention of others. If we find Timaeus the principal interlocutor of the dialogue named after him and the Eleatic visitor of the Sophist and Statesman talking about forms in a way that is entirely consistent with the way Socrates talks about forms in Phaedo and Republic , then there is only one reasonable explanation for that consistency: Plato believes that their way of talking about forms is correct, or is at least strongly supported by powerful considerations.

If, on the other hand, we find that Timaeus or the Eleatic visitor talks about forms in a way that does not harmonize with the way Socrates conceives of those abstract objects, in the dialogues that assign him a central role as director of the conversation, then the most plausible explanation for these discrepancies is that Plato has changed his mind about the nature of these entities. It would be implausible to suppose that Plato himself had no convictions about forms, and merely wants to give his readers mental exercise by composing dialogues in which different leading characters talk about these objects in discordant ways.

The same point—that we must view the dialogues as the product of a single mind, a single philosopher, though perhaps one who changes his mind—can be made in connection with the politics of Plato's works. It is noteworthy, to begin with, that Plato is, among other things, a political philosopher.

For he gives expression, in several of his writings particular Phaedo , to a yearning to escape from the tawdriness of ordinary human relations. Similarly, he evinces a sense of the ugliness of the sensible world, whose beauty pales in comparison with that of the forms.

Because of this, it would have been all too easy for Plato to turn his back entirely on practical reality, and to confine his speculations to theoretical questions. Some of his works— Parmenides is a stellar example—do confine themselves to exploring questions that seem to have no bearing whatsoever on practical life.

But it is remarkable how few of his works fall into this category. Even the highly abstract questions raised in Sophist about the nature of being and not-being are, after all, embedded in a search for the definition of sophistry; and thus they call to mind the question whether Socrates should be classified as a sophist—whether, in other words, sophists are to be despised and avoided.

In any case, despite the great sympathy Plato expresses for the desire to shed one's body and live in an incorporeal world, he devotes an enormous amount of energy to the task of understanding the world we live in, appreciating its limited beauty, and improving it.

His tribute to the mixed beauty of the sensible world, in Timaeus , consists in his depiction of it as the outcome of divine efforts to mold reality in the image of the forms, using simple geometrical patterns and harmonious arithmetic relations as building blocks. The desire to transform human relations is given expression in a far larger number of works.

Socrates presents himself, in Plato's Apology , as a man who does not have his head in the clouds that is part of Aristophanes' charge against him in Clouds. He does not want to escape from the everyday world but to make it better. He presents himself, in Gorgias , as the only Athenian who has tried his hand at the true art of politics. Similarly, the Socrates of Republic devotes a considerable part of his discussion to the critique of ordinary social institutions—the family, private property, and rule by the many.

The motivation that lies behind the writing of this dialogue is the desire to transform or, at any rate, to improve political life, not to escape from it although it is acknowledged that the desire to escape is an honorable one: the best sort of rulers greatly prefer the contemplation of divine reality to the governance of the city.

And if we have any further doubts that Plato does take an interest in the practical realm, we need only turn to Laws. A work of such great detail and length about voting procedures, punishments, education, legislation, and the oversight of public officials can only have been produced by someone who wants to contribute something to the improvement of the lives we lead in this sensible and imperfect realm.