Catherine Zuckert's Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues is an extraordinary achievement. Zuckert's scholarly erudition is in evidence on every page, and the work as a whole is suffused with humane learning. Even when she is overturning academic orthodoxies in the reading of Plato, Zuckert is a model of fairness, in contrasting, for example, the “developmentalist” reading of the dialogues against her own dramatic chronology; establishing this very chronology; and engaging interpreters of Plato across scholarly traditions. But, to my mind, the most important challenge to readers is Zuckert's investigation of the fundamental questions of Plato's thought and those of the Socrates he depicts in the dialogues—the questions, she argues, that drive the narrative arc of the dialogues.

To do justice to the book would take another as long and as dense. In what follows, then, I confine myself to its beginning and to the terrain of questions that Zuckert lays out in her opening investigation of the dialogues. My remarks are tentative, not least given the great difficulty of the questions at stake in Plato's corpus and of the interpretive challenges that confront every reader who would seek clarity about them. But if readers learn anything from Zuckert's example, it is, as she says, that we must make a beginning somewhere if we are to move “in the direction in which human beings need to move”: toward that wisdom through which we most come to know ourselves (861–62).

In taking up the beginning of Zuckert's study, my remarks are oriented first by the important frame, or double frame, of the book. By its “double frame,” I mean: (1) the presentation of the dialogues in accord with their dramatic dating, rather than their supposed compositional dating; and (2) the presentation of Socratic philosophy and the life of Socrates as an inquiry into the fundamental questions of the philosophic life and as the best alternative against the other “philosophers” of the dialogues (the differences among whom are helpfully summarized in a table on pp. 44–45). For the most part, these frames are consistent with each other: the dialogues depict the inquiry of Socrates in the order in which it occurred. But they are not simply consistent with one another, and this points to the set of puzzles I pose. First, what are we to make of the “story within the story,” that is, of Socrates's own intellectual autobiography—in the Phaedo, Symposium, and Apology—as it stands in the narrative arc that Zuckert draws? Second, what precisely are the questions at stake at the beginning of the Socratic quest, the questions, that is, that impel Socrates's turn from the study of the heavens to the moral and political things? Let me sketch the background for these puzzles.

Plato's Philosophers begins from and ends with what is arguably the question of Socratic political philosophy: What is philosophy? Or what is a philosopher? It approaches this difficult question by way of the following ones: What can human beings know and in what manner can we know it? One could say that the former question—what is philosophy or a philosopher?—is examined, as directly as it can be, in the trilogy of dialogues Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman. And one could say that the latter questions—what can human beings know, and in what manner can we know it?—are addressed most directly in Plato's Charmides, the dialogue ostensibly devoted to moderation, and in the dialogues that depict the various stages of Socrates's intellectual autobiography: the Phaedo, the Symposium, and the Apology. But in ordering the dialogues in accord with their dramatic dating, so far as this order can be established, and in dealing with all thirty-five dialogues, Zuckert shows how these questions are pursued in the full arc of Socrates's life: from the dialogue that depicts the conversation between the very young Socrates and the venerable Parmenides to the one that depicts the last day of Socrates's seventy years on earth.

By following the arc of Socrates's life in this way, Zuckert shows us that philosophy emerges in history and has a history and that the inquiry undertaken by Socrates grows out of a terrain of problems distinctive of the origin or beginning of philosophy. By making thematic the questions at the heart of the Socratic quest, moreover, her interpretive sweep of the Platonic corpus never loses sight of the questions that must be addressed if philosophy—the life devoted to independent reason—is to be both possible and good. She thus illuminates Plato's most important reasons for writing: to present the philosophic life as it was embodied in his teacher; to undertake a dialectical inquiry of its fundamental claims; and, on the basis of a clear-sighted understanding of what philosophy is and what a human being can know and in what manner, to defend the philosophic life as the best life for a human being.

Zuckert's account of the Socratic quest begins with the two dialogues that she places earliest in the dramatic order: first and perhaps most controversially, Plato's Laws; second and less controversially, his Parmenides. In what follows, I give only a sketch of her presentations of these two dialogues, focusing on the questions or problems that emerge in her discussion of them and that appear to belong to the Socratic quest. In her treatment of the Laws, Zuckert rejects the orthodox view, held by no less a thinker than Aristotle, that the Athenian Stranger is Socrates or perhaps a stand-in for a Socrates who picked up his sinews and bones and lit out for Crete rather than drink the hemlock. Zuckert argues, rather, that the Laws is set in the period shortly after the end of the Persian Wars (the last event referenced being the battle of Salamis of 480 BCE), and that the Athenian Stranger represents a “pre-Socratic figure” and something of a rival to the Socrates of the dialogues (52–58, esp. 54 and 56, including the qualification regarding the Athenian Stranger's “innovation” on pre-Socratic philosophy in insisting on the priority of soul to body on 56; see also 128). In the Laws, she argues, we see the inadequacy of pre-Socratic (Ionian) natural philosophy, the original form of philosophy, to support the political project of reform laid out by the Athenian Stranger—an inadequacy that is brought out especially at the end of the dialogue with the Stranger's proposals for the education in the Nocturnal Council (56, 128, 138–46). This inadequacy is in part connected with the materialism of this strand of pre-Socratic thought and its corollary that the cosmos is simply matter in continuous motion, for how would philosophy itself even be possible, there being no intelligible order for the human mind to grasp? But, more importantly, the Laws shows us, this inadequacy is connected with the failure of pre-Socratic philosophy, even as it is reformulated by the Athenian Stranger, to take account of the deepest concerns of human beings: the concern for human excellence or virtue and most particularly the concern about what is just, noble, and good. Indeed, even if it could be shown that “an all-encompassing, intelligible order exists,” the question would still remain “whether it supports or fosters human happiness” (146; see also 144). In any event, the natural studies of the Nocturnal Council, which are premised on the view that the fundamental condition of the universe is “immortal war,” are at odds with the need for enduring standards that ground the unity of the political community and human excellence (144–45). The very tasks set down by the Athenian Stranger at the conclusion of the Laws—the investigation into the unity of virtue, for example—are not “compatible with a cosmos in which everything is in motion” (147–48).

Such difficulties, Zuckert suggests, help to explain Socrates's move in the direction of a doctrine or theory that becomes distinctive of Platonic thought: a doctrine or theory of the “ideas” or “forms,” understood as eternal and unchanging beings, on the basis of which the investigation of the human cosmos and virtue can be undertaken. Yet, in the Parmenides, we see among other things the challenge regarding the ideas that Parmenides posed for the young Socrates. For Parmenides showed Socrates that his doctrine of the ideas could not address the following questions: (1) What the ideas are, each in its distinctiveness, or what there are ideas of; (2) How sensible things—the sensible world—participate in the ideas or these intelligible beings; and (3) Whether it is possible to explain the whole by explaining “the interrelation of things essentially different in kind” (177–79). In sum, Parmenides raised the question whether these ideas have any existence outside of the human mind.

These first two dialogues in Zuckert's presentation of the narrative arc of the dialogues thus present its initial frame and two philosophers or philosophical ways—that of the Athenian Stranger and of Parmenides—against which Plato contrasts the Socratic one. The book as a whole seeks to vindicate, if with qualifications, the Socratic alternative against these other philosophical positions and approaches, as well as against those represented by Timaean cosmology and the dialectical science of the Eleatic Stranger. In defending the philosophic life, moreover, Socrates had also to investigate the claims about what is noble, just, and good of his fellow Athenians, claims that reflected their education by the poets. In the face of these challenges, Socrates sought not only to save the possibility of philosophy but also to show, against claims to the contrary, that the philosophic life is best for a human being. The arc of Zuckert's book follows the arc of Socrates's investigations into these matters through the dialogues.

Now, if all this, even in this summary version, is not complicated enough, a puzzle emerges when we consider Zuckert's account of the beginning of the narrative arc of the dialogues and of the order of the Socratic inquiry that it is intended to represent. For, as it turns out, Zuckert does not and cannot proceed so directly through the dialogues as she orders them. In the chapter “Becoming Socrates,” which follows her discussion of the Laws and Parmenides as the earliest dialogues in the dramatic order, she pauses to consider, as a group and out of dramatic order, the three dialogues that contain Socrates's own intellectual autobiography: Phaedo, Symposium, and Apology. This pause is not a simple rest stop on the long road through the corpus. Rather Zuckert sends out a necessary advance party to reconnoiter the terrain of the Socratic quest—an advance party that follows the route of Socrates's own retrospective account of that quest and of what has come to be known as the “Socratic turn” from the study of the heavens to the study of the human things.

This reconnoiter is crucial, but it has puzzling twists. For the dialogues in which we find Socrates's intellectual autobiography do not follow the overarching chronology of Zuckert's narrative. Nor in her treatment of the autobiography itself does she take them up in their own dramatic order. Rather, she takes them up in the order that makes thematic sense of the Socratic turn as reported by Socrates in retrospect in the Phaedo, Symposium, and Apology. The bookends of the autobiographical story, the Phaedo and Apology, are both set at the end of Socrates's life in 399 BCE, each containing an account of a stage or part of Socrates's philosophical quest. The dramatic date of the Symposium is more complicated: the dialogue itself is set sometime after 408, but tells the story of a dinner party at the poet Agathon's house in 416 and includes Socrates's account of his conversation with Diotima regarding erōs, which occurred even earlier, when he was a relatively young man.

In pausing from its orderly movement through the corpus, Zuckert's narrative thus makes a jump, if a necessary one, from the first two dialogues in that order, the Laws and Parmenides, which she locates in the early post–Persian War period, to three dialogues that are set near or after the end of the Peloponnesian War. This jump is necessitated by the fact that the events related in Socrates's autobiography in the latter dialogues are largely contemporary with Zuckert's dating of the Laws and Parmenides, and this autobiography contains important details of Socrates's original turn from the studies of the natural philosophers to his investigation of moral and political matters. The Phaedo tells of Socrates's turn from the study of nature or the direct examination of the beings to his examination of the beings in the speeches (logoi) and his hypothesis of the ideas. Socrates's account of his conversation about erōs with Diotima in the Symposium and depiction of his Delphic quest in the Apology then show how he grappled with the difficulties posed by Parmenides regarding the ideas: difficulties that propelled Socrates's turn from the logoi to the investigation of the opinions (doxai) of his fellow Athenians. Socrates's autobiography in the Phaedo, Symposium, and Apology thus fills a crucial gap in the account of the Socratic turn and so also in Zuckert's narrative, which then moves to the Protagoras, the dialogue next in dramatic order. Zuckert returns later in the book to each of these dialogues in its dramatic order and treats them as artistic wholes in their own right.

The movement of Zuckert's narrative at the beginning, however, raises the following questions: If the dialogues tell the story of Socrates's inquiry into his own activity—an inquiry that seeks to discover what it is that we most need to know as human beings and whether and how we can know it—then what are we to make of Socrates's intellectual autobiography as one story within the overarching dialogic narrative? In particular, how are we to understand this separate and retrospective autobiography against the other two dialogues, the Laws and Parmenides, that belong to Plato's initial framing of the Socratic quest by Zuckert's account?

According to narrative terrain of Plato's Philosophers, for example, the Laws and Parmenides introduce a set of problems that Socrates's philosophic quest confronted: the inadequacy of pre-Socratic philosophy in accounting for, not to say supporting, the concern for human excellence and happiness, for example, and the problems that Parmenides pointed out regarding the young Socrates's related turn to the ideas. Yet to understand precisely how or why this turn came about, as Zuckert shows, we must look to the first part of Socrates's intellectual autobiography in the Phaedo: the story of his inquiry into the question of “cause” and of the failure of the natural scientists to give an adequate account of this question. This failure on the part of the natural scientists consists in their fundamental incoherence regarding the question of cause, which afflicts not only the position of the materialists strictly speaking but also that of Anaxagoras, whose recourse to Nous or Mind as cause Socrates had initially found most promising (Phaedo 97d6–98c6). In Socrates's autobiography, then, it is the Phaedo that tells the story of his turn to the “speeches” (logoi)—his “second sailing” on the question of cause—and to the ideas or forms as the “hypothesis” (hupothesis) of his dialectical investigation of the “opinions” (doxai) that are revealed in the speeches. The Symposium and the Apology tell of subsequent points in his second sailing: his education in erōs and investigation of his fellow citizens’ opinions about the just, the beautiful or noble, and the good, which was so key to his quest but which landed him in so much trouble with these same citizens.

Now, the final part of my sketch here deviates from Zuckert's presentation in seeing the turn to the opinions as a natural or necessary part of the turn to the speeches in the Phaedo. But her account makes clear, at any rate, that central to the investigation of the speeches and the opinions is the hypothesis Socrates employs as the “safest” beginning point of his second sailing: the hypothesis of the ideas (Phaedo 100b1–e3). For this reason alone, we see why the Parmenides is important to Zuckert's account of Socrates's philosophical quest since the problems concerning the ideas presented there would appear to raise the deepest difficulties with that quest. Yet, I am then moved to wonder: if, along with the Laws, the Parmenides belongs to Plato's initial framing of this quest, why is it set apart from Socrates's intellectual autobiography? Why, that is, is the conversation with Parmenides, and the substance of this conversation, not of a piece with Socrates's intellectual autobiography or appropriate to it, especially since he appears to learn something crucial from Parmenides? Why, in general, are some aspects of his quest appropriate to a retrospective autobiographical treatment and some not? Does the Phaedo, together with the Symposium and Apology, for example, reveal something about Socrates's self-understanding of his quest that the Laws and Parmenides do not? If so, are these revelations of such a kind as to be appropriately treated retrospectively and, indeed, at a distance from the original inquiry?

Perhaps here I do not do full justice to Zuckert's full presentation, which nests Socrates's autobiography in the Phaedo, Apology, and Symposium (and so the development of his distinctive method of inquiry) within her presentation of the Laws and the Parmenides. Yet, if the dramatic character of the dialogues is crucial to our understanding of the substance of those dialogues, then what are we to make of the different dramatic treatments of the stages of Socrates's intellectual development, and most especially of the fact that the difficulties raised in the Parmenides do not appear to belong to Socrates's own retelling of his turn?

This question, it seems to me, is connected with the status of the ideas in the Socratic quest. According to Zuckert, the ideas are the anchor of Socrates's response to the failure of the natural philosophers to find the cause of the whole: the turn to the speeches that we hear of in the Phaedo becomes necessary because the ideas are necessarily inferred from the speeches that we use to describe the things or beings of our world (185–89) and because only the ideas account for the character of the beings as the wholes that they are; they are the necessary condition of our grasp of these beings (188). Socrates is aware, Zuckert argues, of the difficulties that attach to his position: the difficulties raised by Parmenides, as well as Socrates's inability to explain how the sensible world participates in the intelligible realm of the ideas, a problem that remained with him to the day of his death (187, 189). Nevertheless, she observes, the ideas remain the best of all the alternatives in addressing the question of cause. In light of the failure of the earlier philosophers to discover a single cause of the natural whole, the ideas in fact represent the irreducibly plural causes of things, the “noetic heterogeneity” of the whole. Although the ideas cannot explain why things are what they are—Zuckert argues that Socrates does not attempt any longer to give an account of why things come to be or perish—they nonetheless explain what things are, as the kinds they are, as a result of the presence of the idea in them (189). Socrates's knowledge of ignorance, then, is a knowledge of the limits of human wisdom regarding cause, yet the investigation that he undertakes nonetheless can make progress on the basis of his hypothesis regarding the ideas.

Now, as Zuckert acknowledges, there is much dispute about the status of the ideas, or the theory of the forms, in Plato's thought (see, e.g., 185n12, 186n13)—dispute that seems to have begun almost immediately if we take our bearings from Aristotle's criticism of the forms (see, e.g., Metaphysics I.6, 9, XIII.4-10). I do not have the competence to adjudicate such a dispute. I wonder only whether Plato's Socrates does or could set aside the question of the cause of the whole—that he does or could rely so much on a hypothesis—in establishing the possibility and goodness of the philosophic life as the life of independent reason (cf. Phaedo 99c8–d2). At the very least, it seems to me, his setting aside of this question would cast a dark shadow over the latter claim.

But perhaps this shadow is lightened if not dispelled by the manner in which the Socratic quest is shown to proceed in what follows in the next chapters of the book. For Zuckert argues that by examining the opinions of those who claimed to know the greatest things—the beautiful or noble, the just, and the good—and by leading promising youths to his understanding of the beautiful and the good, Socrates achieved two things: (1) he purified his own understanding in “speech,” and (2) in “deed,” he achieved certainty, or the greatest certainty possible for a human being, that “his final vision was not merely that—a vision, dream, or intimation as opposed to knowledge” (198). Zuckert is surely right that Socrates, and anyone who professes to love wisdom, must search out the path to such certainty or clarity of vision. The question at stake, which Zuckert so powerfully places before her readers, is how the philosopher can have the confidence that this life is not mere dreaming.

It belongs to Zuckert's treatment of the coherence of the dialogues, and Plato's defense of the superiority of Socratic philosophy against the alternatives, that she marks a path of inquiry for readers of Plato who are gripped by the question of the possibility and goodness of the philosophic life and who wish to live in full wakefulness regarding what is best for a human being. She helps her readers to see that this inquiry necessitates Socrates's turn from the study of the natural or divine things to the study of the human things, and, more precisely, to the examination of moral and political opinions. She further shows that it is only by way of examining these opinions that we can have access to the one being that desires to know and to the opinions that move this being to act one way rather than another.

Indeed, this examination is at stake even in the Laws, at the end of which, as Zuckert shows (145–46), we are led into strikingly familiar Socratic territory and to “the ‘beginning’ or central concern of Platonic political philosophy” (145). According to the Athenian Stranger, the treatment of moral and political matters, of the laws, necessarily leads to the study of the virtues and the unity of virtue; to the inquiry into the idea of the beautiful and that of the good; and to the investigation of the proofs concerning the gods, especially the proof regarding the soul, its priority to body and its immortality (Laws 964e1–968a1)—the same investigation, that is, that occupies Socrates and his interlocutors on the last day of his life and is the context of his account of his turn. Or to put this more generally, in the Laws too, moral and political concerns prove to be inseparable from the philosophical questions that the Athenian Stranger points to and that impel the Socratic inquiry into the human things. Perhaps, then, there is some way in which the Laws belongs both to the beginning and to the end of the dramatic chronology, in showing how the questions with which philosophy is necessarily concerned have their roots in and are even in some sense coeval with our moral and political concerns—with what Aristotle would say is “known to us” as opposed to “known simply” (Nicomachean Ethics 1095a30–b6). If, as Zuckert argues, the natural science of the pre-Socratics is not adequate to the inquiry into the beautiful and the good that forms the core of the Platonic corpus—a problem that endures today in the disjunction between the natural and the human sciences (see again 145)—then the Socratic turn to the human things must be re-examined in the light of the kinds of questions that are central to Zuckert's investigation: What is philosophy or a philosopher? What can human beings know, and in what manner can we know it?

Plato's Philosophers is a timely work in returning us to the timeless concerns of philosophy and political philosophy. This fact about the book does not surprise me given the nature of Zuckert's earlier book, Postmodern Platos, but also given what I have come to know of the path that her own inquiries have taken. This path has led to the challenge that she presents every student of Plato in grappling with the gravity of the questions at stake in the Platonic corpus and in treating the dialogues as the complex works of art that they are. It often seems that in light of the interpretive challenge the dialogues present, they prove to be a mirror of the reader who takes them up. If so, our good fortune is that in Plato's Philosophers, we have a guide of Zuckert's caliber. The book is clearly a testament to her exemplary life of thought, speech, and deed.