The Guardians in Action

Plato the Teacher and the Post-Republic Dialogues from Timaeus to Theaetetus

By (author) William H. F. Altman

Publication date:

17 March 2016

Length of book:

554 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498517867

If you’ve ever wondered why Plato staged Timaeus as a kind of sequel to Republic, or who its unnamed missing fourth might be; or why he joined Critias to Timaeus, and whether or not that strange dialogue is unfinished; or what we should make of the written critique of writing in Phaedrus, and of that dialogue’s apparent lack of unity; or what is the purpose of the long discussion of the One in the second half of Parmenides, and how it relates to the objections made to the Theory of Forms in its first half; or if the revisionists or unitarians are right about Philebus, and why its Socrates seems less charming than usual, or whether or not Cratylus takes place after Euthyphro, and whether its far-fetched etymologies accomplish any serious philosophical purpose; or why the philosopher Socrates describes in the central digression of Theaetetus is so different from Socrates himself; then you will enjoy reading the continuation of William H. F. Altman’s Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington; 2012), where he considers the pedagogical connections behind “the post-Republic dialogues” from Timaeus to Theaetetus in the context of “the Reading Order of Plato’s dialogues.”

Preface: Plato the Teacher and the post-Republic Dialogues

Introduction: The Guardians in Action

1 Timaeus-Critias: “A Deceptive Cosmos of Words”

1. Cicero and Taylor’s Timaeus
2. Plato’s Parmenidean Pedagogy
3. Demiurge, World Soul, and Receptacle
4. The Missing Speech of the Absent Fourth
5. Critias, Phaedrus, and the Theological-Political Problem

2 Phaedrus as Fair Warning

6. “Whither, forsooth, and Whence?”
7. The Science of Deception
8. Introducing Collection and Division
9. The Three Speeches
10. Rereading Phaedrus

3 Parmenides as Preliminary Training

11. The Problem of the One and the Many
12. Three Dianoetic Interventions
13. Plato’s Trinity and Young Socrates

4 Philebus: “As if in Battle”

14. The Restoration
15. The Most Difficult Test: γένεσις εἰς οὐσίαν
16. Philebus and Reading Order

5 Beginning of the End: Cratylus and Theaetetus

17. False Assumptions and Midwifery
18. The Theaetetus Digression as Crisis: Fight or Flight?
19. Looking Forward and Back

Bibliography

Altman does an admirable job of separating Plato from his later reception (i.e. he makes a very conscious attempt to disentangle Plato’s own views from subsequent Platonism) and the volume is particularly rich in terms of the range of topics treated and number of challenges posed to the commonly held view of Plato. Enlightening as it is to read the Platonic dialogues on their own, our understanding of them is certainly enhanced when they can be used to illuminate one another, and Altman supplies the reader with numerous examples of how this can function in the case of the dialogues under discussion. Altman has produced a thought-provoking book that stretches across an extensive canvas and re-evaluates the nature and interrelationship of some of Plato’s most enduring works.