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INTRODUCTION
man beings speak differently to different people in real life?) Or might
different contexts explain discrepancies in what a character says? Could
it be the case that different conversations stress different aspects of the
whole, and so different emphases are highlighted in different places?
Or is Socrates simply trading on the equivocity in phrases such as “the
Good” and “the pleasurable”? Or is it to accomplish different ends that
a character such as Socrates will speak differently to different people?
Or is it rather that Plato changes his mind from dialogue to dialogue (or
at least—as the school of interpretation known as “developmentalism”
would have it—from compositional period to compositional period:
early, middle, and late)? Of course, these questions can only be pursued
concretely once one has discovered a way to ascertain Plato’s views in the
fi rst place. So we must make a new beginning.
Readers may ask: If Plato is not aiming to tell his audience his
deepest beliefs or convictions, what other reasons for writing might he
have had? Perhaps he just wanted to entertain people with his fi ctional
dramas. Maybe he wanted to display the human condition in all of its
tragic and all of its comic dimensions, as that delicious suggestion near
the close of the Symposium gestures toward. Perhaps he wished to hold
up a mirror to his fellow Athenians as they engaged in the search for
scapegoats after their defeat in war, the overthrow of the city by the so-
called Thirty Tyrants, and the trial and execution of Socrates. Perhaps
he wanted to preserve a sense of what it was like to talk to Socrates, by
means of a way of writing that sacrifi ces (or at least subordinates) his
own voice in order to keep alive the voice of Socrates. Maybe he wanted
to provide exercises, “likely stories” (Timaeus 29c– d), philosophical ex-
emplars, and new topoi for human beings inclined toward philosophy.
Or perhaps he wished to convert more people to the practice of philoso-
phy than just those who could attend his school, extending his reach
so that kindred philosophical spirits could be reached across time and
space. Or perhaps he wanted to examine philosophical issues by placing
them in question in a way that would allow their fullest complexity to be
grasped without resolving anything, but instead trying out a series of hy-
potheses, or thought-experiments. It is soon apparent that the question,
“Why write?” is a very different (and somehow more fundamental) one
than the question: “Why write in this way?” “Why write dialogues?”
With a renewed sense of purpose, a new reader might now begin to
think about the various ways in which the dialogues of Plato work, which
might also entail coming to understand how Plato’s writings differ from
the other forms of writing from which we distinguished them earlier.
One might begin to pay attention to the characters featured in a given
dialogue and to the way Plato “sketches” them. Many of the characters’