Dialogues with Plato

Martha Husain is an associate professor of philosophy at Brock
University in St. Catharines.

Most of the contributions in this interesting and worthwhile volume were
presented at the 1994 conference of the Australasian Society for Ancient
Philosophy. They are arranged according to the usual chronology of
Plato’s works, from the Crito to the Sophist. Each contributor
interprets Plato’s arguments within a wider textual or cultural
context and tries to avoid anachronism. These contexts range from some
facet of a dialogue’s literary aspects, to Socrates’s lifelong
practice of philosophia (which rules out sophia), to different ancient
musicological models, to Plato’s general distrust of language.

Awareness of the danger of anachronism is a welcome feature of this
volume, as is the focus on methodological problems. Whether or not one
agrees with an author’s proposed wider interpretive context, it
becomes amenable to reasoned discussion when it is made explicit.

Reasoned discussion is indeed provoked. It is a truism that the
arguments of the dialogues should not be interpreted in isolation from
their literary aspects. The problem lies in the richness, complexity,
and ambiguity of these literary aspects. Which aspects are to be
utilized, and how is one to avoid subordinating or reducing the
arguments to them? Similarly, interpreting one text in the light of
general Platonic positions is sound enough, except that it is unclear
whether and how one text bears on another, especially across what seem
to be chronological divides. For this reviewer, the most successful
exegetical use of a wider cultural context is Andrew Barber’s essay on
the Philebus, which brings two contrasting musicological models to bear
on the text’s notion of musical techne.

In addition to its obvious appeal to the Plato specialist, Dialogues
with Plato offers good secondary material for class use.