reality. In the Cratylus (which shares many characteristics with the late dialogues) he discusses current
theories of language and word-meaning. Most strikingly, perhaps, the nature of his interest in ethics and
politics changes considerably.
In the early dialogues he is concerned with the personal achievement of virtue, and this is still the theme
of his most famous middle dialogue, the Republic. In that dialogue his interest has spread sufficiently to
society for the account of the just person to be placed against a background of the just society; but it is
made clear that this is a society which is ideally just, an ideal which has no practicable political
application. However, in the late dialogues we find Plato returning at length and several times to ethical
and political questions from a changed perspective, one that has much in common with the formerly
despised approach of Protagoras and the other sophists. In the Statesman, the Critias, and the Laws he
returns to fifth-century questions about the origins of society, takes history and prehistory seriously, and
investigates from several angles the issue of what social arrangements actually work and produce a
stably functioning real society. The study of ethics and politics is no longer seen from the viewpoint of
the individual concerned to become just, but is carried out from the external viewpoint of the
investigator, impersonally and historically. (As we would expect, the result is much duller, though more
solid and doubtless more useful.)
The late dialogues show a fairly comprehensive reversion to traditional issues which Socrates had swept
aside: cosmology; concern with the Eleatic arguments; interest in reasoning and in rhetoric; and the
historical and political study of society. Further, the late dialogues are the product, most probably, of
teaching and discussion with pupils, in the established forum of the philosophical school. We even hear
that Plato came to propound 'unwritten doctrines' of a Pythagorean-sounding kind, a bizarre
mathematical metaphysics in which the contents of the universe were 'derived' from the One and the
Indefinite Two. (The chief interest of this lies in Aristotle's criticisms of it in Metaphysics M and N.)
Plato has travelled a long way back from Socrates to rejoin the tradition.
It would be wrong, however, to see this as a failure of nerve, or of originality. Plato's ambivalent relation
to philosophy as he found it brought it about that he enriched and transformed the tradition to which he
returned. Like his ambivalent relation to writing, it produced a corpus of work unparalleled for its
variety of appeal, and one in which discussions of contemporary issues arc never conventional or
derivative. Plato would not have been the great philosopher he is if Socrates had not influenced him, or
if he had influenced him more consistently.
Aristotle
Aristotle (384-322) was a product of the Academy; he came there when he was eighteen and stayed
there till Plato's death. He came from Stagira in the north of Greece, from a medical family with
connections at court in the increasingly powerful state of Macedonia. After he left the Academy he spent
some time at the court of Assus in Asia Minor, and then acted as a tutor to Alexander the Great-an
episode that made remarkably little impact on either of them. About 335 he returned to Athens and set
up his own philosophical school, the Lyceum. In 323 he fled to escape the hostility to pro-Macedonians