Platonic Questions

Plato never speaks in his own name. Every idea in the dialogues comes to us through characters, settings and conversations, yet many modern philosophers strip that form away to get at the arguments underneath. Diskin Clay, a distinguished classicist, asks what is lost when we do, and reads Plato as a writer as well as a thinker, set against the Greek literature and history that shaped him.

The book moves from Plato's portraits of Socrates and his complicated relation to his teacher, through the literary and philosophical character of the dialogues, to the ways they argue and the major themes they return to. It gives the philosophy its full weight while insisting that how Plato wrote is part of what he meant. For students and readers of Plato who suspect the drama of the dialogues matters as much as their conclusions.