Ebook: Discovering Plato

Originally published as no. 9 of the Columbia Studies in Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University

What sort of book about Plato is this? Why another book about Plato where there are already thousands? Well, there are many volumes alledgedly about Plato which are not about that great Greek writer and thinker at all. They are about orthodoxies that have been offered under his name. They are about systems that have been made about his thought. They are about everything but the dialogues themselves, and often they only confuse rather than help the reader when he comes to reading those. There are books about books about Plato. There are studies by historians of his time or by philologians who debate his grammar, or theologians who fortify themselves with ambiguous Platonic phrases made more ambiguous out of their context. There are A. E. Taylor’s patient critical summaries of the dialogues; there is Paul Shorey's attempt to demonstrate the “Unity” of Plato’s thought.
In all the literature on the subject there are very few books which start where M. Koyré starts, with the dialogues themselves, and place the reader almost at once where he should be placed, in the situation of a reader of the dialogue, a hearer almost, or what M. Koyré suggestively terms a “reader-auditor.” M. Koyré seizes upon the peculiar paradoxes of the dialogues, paradoxes which his analysis makes much less baffling. There is the apparent inconclusiveness of the dialogues in writings which are obviously serious in their moral intentions. I leave it to the reader to see how skilfully M. Koyré enables him to see the senses in which the dialogues are on the surface inconclusive, but the sense, too, in which the central theme of the moral and theoretical supremacy of knowledge is always uttered and reuttered.