Philosophy in Dialogue : Plato's Many Devices

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Introduction

Gary Alan Scott

Questions concerning Plato’s many and varied devices arise almost im-
mediately upon beginning to read one’s fi rst Platonic “dialogue.” Just
what kind of work is a “dialogue,” and how do such works communicate
their author’s philosophical views? To what sort of literar y genre or phil-
osophical “school” do Plato’s dialogues belong? Readers new to Plato
quickly notice that there is something peculiar about his philosophical
texts: they are decidedly not fi rst-person essays or treatises, the standard
form in which most modern and contemporary philosophy has been
presented. These “dialogues” are also not “critical” works (such as Kant’s
three “critiques”), nor are they archaeologies or genealogies, polemics,
meditations, confessions, consolations, letters, handbooks, or autobiog-
raphies. Plato’s dialogues are not written in the fi rst person, because
in them Plato never speaks in his own voice (though he might be said
to speak in his own voice in the oft-disputed letters attributed to him).
Instead, there are often several voices heard, and frequently others (in-
cluding various poets and historians) echoed in a single dialogue.
Plato’s audience is indeed presented with a variation on the fi rst-
person voice in a dialogue such as the Apology of Socrates, but the voice
one hears is the voice of Socrates and not the voice of Plato. The Apology
is a “direct” dialogue, rather than a “reported” (or “narrated”) dialogue.
Socrates delivers his speech directly to his large jury and audience, and
his speech is not mediated by any narrator or “narrative frame.” There-
fore, the reader has the impression that Socrates is speaking directly to
her. But of course, Socrates is not the author of this work. So the fact
that Socrates speaks directly to the reader does not create the kind of
fi rst-person point of view that would permit one to read off what the
author, Plato, thinks from what is said in the fi rst person by a character,
Socrates, in the drama Plato immortalized.
The new reader quickly notices that it is characters (such as
Socrates, Euthyphro, Laches, Crito, Phaedo, Gorgias, and some seventy
others) who speak and interact in little plays, in which the talk quickly
turns to questions at the heart of human life. Since the nineteenth cen-