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INTRODUCTIONmatter. It is simply that philosophy today has moved so far away from
practice that it is necessary to remind modern readers that spiritual
exercises were very much a part of the way of life called “philosophy”
in antiquity. In Plato’s dialogues, particularly, ethics and metaphysics
seem to interpenetrate on ever-higher levels of understanding and ex-
pression. Work on one’s behaviors and practices was an integral part
of the practice of philosophy, as I suspect Plato understood it. This is
why the philosophers Plato features in his dramas are chiefl y concerned
with what they regard as fundamental human concerns. Central among
these concerns were the questions: “What is the best way to live?” and
“What is the Good?” Not surprisingly, then, Plato’s philosophical ex-
emplars are often concerned in his dialogues with practical, existential
questions rather than solely speculative ones. Or to put it another way,
we might better say that the speculative inquiries are motivated by, and
brought to bear upon, pressing fundamental human concerns.
Whereas Plato in his dialogues seems to have been thoroughly en-
gaged in wresting a distinctive meaning for philosophia by carving out
its signifi cation from, and contrasting it with, rival paths to wisdom,
contemporary philosophy has become increasingly narrow and more
specialized. It consists primarily in the study of texts. Far from being a
way of life, contemporary philosophy has become primarily academic
philosophy, a training of specialists by specialists. Most philosophers to-
day are employed by a college or university, are required to teach and
to publish, and, as a result, both the ancient tradition of philosophy as
a way of life and that tradition’s guiding questions have given way to the
study of myriad philosophies and the texts that express them.
It would hardly be surprising, then, if our modern understand-
ing of philosophy colored the way Plato is now read and interpreted.
It should also not be surprising if contemporary philosophy, no longer
connected to any way of life except “the way of life of a university profes-
sor,” as Hadot puts it, has become a highly technical and overly abstract
endeavor. Through the centuries since Plato lived and wrote, philoso-
phy has differentiated itself from history, from literature (including my-
thology, drama, and poetry), from rhetoric, theology, political science,
the natural sciences, and psychology.
It is to the dramatic, literary, interdisciplinary Plato described
above that the textbooks could hardly do justice. Hence it is this Plato
that is reexamined in this collection of original essays. Several of the
essays included here suggest new models for thinking about what Plato
is doing in his dialogues and for adumbrating his conception of phi-
losophy itself. Others focus on Plato’s use of Socrates as a character in
his dramas. The overwhelming majority of Plato’s dialogues feature