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INTRODUCTIONSocrates’ trial is no mere transcript or “court report”; and moreover,
in the Phaedo, Plato intriguingly writes himself out of the last conversa-
tion between Socrates and the members of his circle. An industrious
fi rst-time reader might have already searched the casts of characters in
a collected edition of Plato’s dialogues only to discover that there is no
character named “Plato” who puts forth the author’s views against other
characters in any of the dialogues. Indeed, nowhere does a character
named “Plato” defend a thesis or construct an argument, and therefore
whatever Plato might “mean” and whatever the historical Plato might
have believed, his dialogues do not express directly his beliefs or state
his meaning in a fi rst-person voice. Therefore, it would seem to be prima
facie false for commentators to say loosely, “Plato says,” for Plato does
not “say” anything in these dramas.^7 Many characters make assertions
and put forth arguments in Plato’s texts, but none of them is named
“Plato.” One is therefore quickly forced to wonder: What kind of philo-
sophical argument is required to ascribe views to Plato? How should one
go about discerning the author’s thought? And what might Plato have
wished his audiences to take away from these (more or less) dramatic,
philosophical works? In short, how should one go about interpreting a
Platonic dialogue?
It would seem that the task of discerning Plato’s thoughts or
“meaning” from the words and actions of his characters is a task that
more closely resembles the interpretation of the works of Shakespeare
or Sophocles than the interpretation of the works of almost any modern
philosopher. (And here it is noteworthy that commentators on Elizabe-
than drama do not say: “Shakespeare says, ‘To be or not to be—that is
the question: / Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against the sea
of troubles / And by opposing, end them’ ”; they say that Hamlet asks
himself this question!) Now since Plato’s dialogues are more or less dra-
matic, and since they make or do something in the course of the work,
one wonders how this dramatic element might complicate the task of
justifying inferences about what Plato thought (or might have wanted
his audiences to think or to “get”) from the words of his characters.
How should one begin to determine what Plato would have his audi-
ence think or believe, much less what he himself thinks or believes? To
be sure, this cannot be determined a priori. How then might one show
that because character X says Y, Plato believes (or wants us to believe)
Y? Doesn’t this very way of formulating the question presuppose that
philosophy consisted, for Plato, in a set of problems and positions, argu-
ments and inferences?
One would need to begin interpreting any one of Plato’s dia-