The Guardians on Trial

The Reading Order of Plato's Dialogues from Euthyphro to Phaedo

By (author) William H. F. Altman

Publication date:

19 July 2016

Length of book:

638 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498529518

Based on a conception of Reading Order introduced and developed in his Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington; 2012) and The Guardians in Action: Plato the Teacher and the Post-Republic Dialogues from Timaeus to Theaetetus (Lexington; 2016), William H. F. Altman now completes his study of Plato’s so-called “late dialogues” by showing that they include those that depict the trial and death of Socrates. According to Altman, it is not Order of Composition but Reading Order that makes Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo “late dialogues,” and he shows why Plato’s decision to interpolate the notoriously “late” Sophist and Statesman between Euthyphro and Apology deserves more respect from interpreters. Altman explains this interpolation—and another, that places Laws between Crito and Phaedo—as part of an ongoing test Plato has created for his readers that puts “the Guardians on Trial.” If we don’t recognize that Socrates himself is the missing Philosopher that the Eleatic Stranger never actually describes—and also the antithesis of the Athenian Stranger, who leaves Athens in order to create laws for Crete—we pronounce ourselves too sophisticated to be Plato’s Guardians, and unworthy of the Socratic inheritance.

Acknowledgements

Preface: The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues from Euthyphro to Phaedo

Introduction: The Guardians on Trial

1Beginning the End with Euthyphro

1. “The Great Parmenides”
2. Piety and Parricide

2Plato’s Trilogy: Sophist, Statesman, and Apology of Socrates

3. The Image of the Philosopher in Sophist
4. The Sophist in Plato’s Statesman
5. Apology of Socrates as Plato’s Philosopher

3Hipparchus-Minos: Conversing with the Weeping Jailor

6. Reading Order and Authenticity
7. Basanistic Pedagogy in Plato’s Hipparchus
8. Plato’s Minos: The Snuggest Fit of All

4Crito-Laws-Epinomis: Socrates vs. the Athenian Stranger

9. Achilles in Athens
10. The Athenian Stranger as “Socrates” in Flight
11. The Theological-Political coup d’etat of Laws 13
12. Halfway Toward Epinomis: Reading Laws 7
13. A Tale of Two Drinking Parties

5The Immortal Phaedo

14. Putting Cosmology in its Place
15. Cratylus Revisited: αἰθήρ, Hades, and Apollo
16. Immortality and the Intermediates: Purification vs. Proof
17. Justice as Cause: The Argument of the Action
18. Before Protagoras

Bibliography

Index

Index verborum
Index locorum

Immensely erudite, while startlingly original—Altman’s claim that Plato intended a univocal reading order for his dialogues opens interpretive vistas on every aspect of Plato’s thinking. Altman takes Plato’s own theories of pedagogy as exegetically foundational, and thereby transforms these dialogues into complex tests designed to reinforce the reader’s mastery of Platonism through the negotiation of an impressive regimen of challenge and misdirection. In The Guardians on Trial, we rediscover what philosophy is for Plato, and how instilling Platonism itself constituted Plato’s deepest commitment.