Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form Review

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(More customer reviews)This is one of the best books on Plato that I have read. Kahn's thesis--that Plato's early and middle dialogues present a unified philosophical vision that is gradually revealed from dialogue to dialogue (what Kahn calls the "ingressive method")--is a new twist on the unitarian thesis that the Platonic corpus gives no evidence for the sort of philosophical development that has been spotted by interpreters such as Grote, Campbell, Vlastos, Owen, and many others (probably most others, in fact). But even if one is a developmentalist at heart, one can benefit greatly from reading this book. The approach is both philosophical and scholarly, of use both to the philosopher and to the classicist. Even when it is difficult to agree with Kahn (for example, he holds that the Gorgias is an earlier work than the Protagoras, in spite of what appears to be a more complex moral psychology and a more sensitive treatment of the hedonist thesis in the former), grappling with his arguments can be both a challenge and a thrill. Rarely does disagreement serve to educate so well.
It is disappointing, though fully understandable, that this book does not treat the late dialogues. There are hints here and there that Kahn thinks he could extend his thesis further, but his treatment of the Pheadrus in the last chapter is more promisory than productive.

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This book offers a new interpretation of Plato's early and middle dialogues as the expression of a unified philosophical vision. Whereas the traditional view sees the dialogues as marking successive stages in Plato's philosophical development, we may more legitimately read them as reflecting an artistic plan for the gradual, indirect and partial exposition of Platonic philosophy. The magnificent literary achievement of the dialogues can be fully appreciated only from the viewpoint of a unitarian reading of the philosophical content.

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