This well-produced volume is a collection of sixteen papers (and a long introduction) in English on the Theaetetus and its reception. Five papers deal with the Theaetetus as a whole and in the context of Plato’s oeuvre (G. Fine, M. Migliori, V. Politis, S.-G. Chappell, A. Brancacci), one with Socratic midwifery (Z. Giannopoulou), two with the first section about sensation and Protagoras (U. Zilioli, Zucca), two with the so-called ‘digression’ (B. Bossi) and its Neoplatonist reception (G.R. Giardina), four with the second section about false opinion (F. Aronadio, E. Maffi, F. Fronterotta, F. Trabattoni), two with the third section (N. Thaler) and its reception in Aristotle (W. Cavini). Some papers present useful summaries of interpretations of the Theaetetus already put forward in monographs on Plato (Fine, Migliori, Aronadio, Maffi, Trabattoni), but most papers offer either a detailed and informed scrutiny of a small section of the dialogue (Zilioli, Zucca, Bossi, Thaler) or aim to throw light on aspects of the Theaetetus through other dialogues (Politis, Chappell, Giannopoulou). A few papers interestingly connect the text they study with issues in contemporary philosophy (Chappell, Zilioli, Cavini).
The Theaetetus has been the subject of so many debates and studies in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that one might wonder whether it is still possible to offer ‘new explorations’ on it. A traditional debate, mentioned in several papers, has been: did Plato write the Theaetetus to argue negatively and indirectly for the existence of intelligible Forms or to redefine knowledge independently of such a metaphysical assumption? In other words, does the Theaetetus guide readers to or away from the Phaedo or Republic 5–7? These questions have often led scholars to focus on the first part of the dialogue about sensation and on the third part about logos. One originality of this volume is to devote comparatively more attention to the second part of the dialogue about opinion (doxa).
The problems raised by this central part of the dialogue can be best introduced by recalling what immediately precedes it. The end of the first part describes knowledge as an activity of the soul sharply distinguished from sensation and directed at common qualities (koina) true of all things. This seems to be a crucial progress in the quest for a definition of knowledge, especially from the perspective of other earlier and later texts by Plato on this subject, such as the Phaedo, the Republic or the Sophist. However, Theaetetus’ next proposal for such a definition, ‘true opinion’, seems disappointing not only from an external perspective (since Plato clearly associates doxa with sensation in the Republic and the Timaeus), but also because of the fact that this definition is hardly discussed by Socrates, who instead investigates at length how false opinion is possible before briefly dismissing Theaetetus’ definition through an example.
Does this mean that the second part is a step backward caused by Theaetetus’ lack of understanding? This is a common interpretation, but, in this volume the papers dealing with the second part all claim that Socrates’ analysis of opinion represents an important contribution to the understanding of knowledge. Trabattoni argues for such a re-evaluation of doxa in the Theaetetus (pp. 272–5) by drawing attention to the tight connection between doxa, thought and logos posited by Socrates at 189e–190a (incidentally, the retrospective contribution of this dialogical description of thought to understanding the refutation of Protagoras is aptly emphasised by Zucca, p. 155). As for Aronadio, he holds that the wax block model of the soul represents progress because it describes opinions as formed through a ‘dynamic cognitive process that involves aisthêsis, mnêmê and dianoia rather than as a static presence in the mind of mental images compared to one another’ (p. 205).
Bringing out the positive contribution of Socrates’ discussion of doxa requires a matching account of its limits. Aronadio insists that the wax block model is dismissed not because it cannot account for errors about non-sensible objects, as Socrates claims at 195c–196b, but because it pictures knowledge as a mechanical ‘retention of non-interconnected data’, typical of an archaic mentality (pp. 210–11). However, these two problems seem tightly connected, and the former is more likely to explain the latter, for Plato, than the other way around. As for the aviary model, Maffi first interprets the emptiness of the aviary in children (197e2) as compatible with the doctrine of recollection of the Meno (pp. 230–2), then claims that the possession of birds in the aviary can be taken to refer to the prenatal knowledge of Forms by the soul (p. 234). These two readings are incompatible. Either the aviary model refers on its own to recollection – they both stand and fall together –, or recollection is the solution ‘seasoned readers’ (p. 235) should reach after correcting crucial assumptions of the aviary model (such as the initial emptiness of the aviary or the assimilation of recollecting/judging to hunting a caged bird).
Fronterotta clearly opts for the second option (pp. 262–3), but not because he thinks Socrates’ models cannot account for our ordinary opinions, as most scholars claim. He holds that they are perfectly consistent in a ‘one-level’, i.e. purely sensible, world such as the one hypothesised in Parmenides 133b (p. 257) and that they become inadequate only on the basis of Plato’s extended ontology (p. 267). This raises a new or, at least, less classical debate about the Theaetetus: whether an epistemology without the Forms can be in itself consistent or accurate.
Zilioli’s paper about the ontology that Socrates attributes to Protagoras and to ‘subtler thinkers’ has much to offer on this score. The ‘secret doctrine’ and the theory of perception it entails are analysed into two metaphysical ‘indeterminacy’ theses (which interestingly make the secret doctrine sound like an interpretation of quantum mechanics), a related semantic view of ineffability and a doctrine of flux (p. 128). Zilioli convincingly argues that this complex doctrine is not refuted as such in the Theaetetus. He finally suggests that it is still worthy of discussion as it was for Plato, Aristotle in Met. Γ, Pyrrho or Indian Buddhist philosophy.
On the opposing side of the same debate, one could probably place Bishop Berkeley, since he drew from a close reading of the Theaetetus that the senses do not understand what they perceive, as is made clear by Brancacci (pp. 359–61). Politis observes that the Theaetetus has been standardly read as a purely epistemological dialogue and disputes this reading, not because he thinks there are metaphysical assumptions behind the dialogue, but because, for Plato, it is impossible to separate epistemology from metaphysics: ‘no thought is based purely in sense-perception’ (p. 62). This ‘inextricability thesis’ is drawn from the Parmenides by Politis but throws light on the koina defined at the end of the first part of the Theaetetus. It also reminds us that, despite all its peculiarities, the Theaetetus is one in a series of dialogues raising a ‘What is X?’ question, and this can only be a metaphysical question for Plato.
Not surprisingly, several other papers address the method of inquiry of the Theaetetus, chiefly Giannopoulou’s: drawing a systematic comparison between Socrates’ midwifery and ‘noble sophistry’ in the Sophist, she lists similarities and differences and then studies three Theaetetus passages about sophists, which are shown to distinguish between sophistry and dialectic not through method alone but through their aim and inspiration (p. 174).
All in all, this is a strong collection of papers testifying to the long-lasting and ongoing importance of the Theaetetus for the understanding of Plato.
