How Plato Writes
Perspectives and Problems

World-renowned scholar Malcolm Schofield shows how Plato's versatile literary qualities are crucial to understanding his philosophy.

Malcolm Schofield (Author)

9781108483087, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 August 2023

320 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.3 cm, 0.61 kg

'A fascinating intervention on Plato by one of his leading contemporary readers, How Plato Writes offers a nuanced and multifaceted exploration of key features of Plato's texts: image and argument, paradox, intertextuality and the literary staging of philosophical conversation. Schofield's probing analyses of thorny passages and interpretive problems are essential reading for experts yet accessible to a wide audience. The different chapters of the volume combine to form an interconnected and illuminating reflection on the challenging, puzzling and often playful nature of Plato's philosophical provocations.' Shaul Tor, King's College London

Plato is a philosophical writer of unusual and ingenious versatility. His works engage in argument but are also full of allegory, imagery, myth, paradox and intertextuality. He astutely characterises the participants whom he portrays in conversation. Sometimes he composes fictive dialogues in dramatic form while at other times he does so as narratives. In this book, world-renowned scholar Malcolm Schofield illustrates the variety of the literary resources that Plato deploys to achieve his philosophical purposes. He draws key passages for discussion particularly, but not only, from Republic and the less well-known Laws and also shows how reconstructing the original historical context of a dialogue and of its assumed readership is essential to understanding Plato's approach. The book will open the eyes of readers of all levels of expertise to Plato's masterly ability as a writer and how an understanding of this is crucial if we are to appreciate his philosophy.

Part I. Approaches to the Corpus: 1. Plato in his Time and Place
2. When and Why Did Plato Write Narrated Dialogues?
3. Against System: the Historical Plato in the Mid-Victorian Era
Part II. Argument and Dialogue Architecture: 4. Callicles' Return: Gorgias 509-22 Reconsidered
5. Likeness and Likenesses in the Parmenides
6. The Elusiveness of Cratylus in the Cratylus
Part III. Myth and Allegory in the Republic: 7. The Noble Lie
8. The Cave
Part IV. Projects, Paradoxes, and Literary Registers in the Laws: 9. Religion and Philosophy in the Laws
10. The Laws' Two Projects
11. Plato, Xenophon, and the laws of Lycurgus
12. Injury, Injustice, and the Involuntary in the Laws
13. Plato's Marionette
14. Paradoxes of Childhood and Play in Heraclitus and Plato.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500 [HPCA]