This collection of fifteen essays honours Christopher Rowe and his scholarship on Plato, and the title echoes that of Rowe's 2007 monograph (Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing). (Do not expect discussion of philosophy as an art or technê.) The contributors are appropriately international, as is the combination, running through the whole book, of philosophical and interpretative questions. Appropriate too is the wide range of interpretative questions. In his introduction B.-S. highlights Rowe's challenges to ‘developmental’ interpretations of Plato and Rowe's own view of Plato as a lifelong Socratic. At this point it rather looks as if the collection will be a cumulative defence of ‘unitarian’ interpretations, whereas in fact only five contributors – M.A. Fierro, N. Notomi, D. Sedley, T. Johansen (perhaps) and G. in his response to Sedley – speak to this particular debate. But that is not a bad thing: a collection dedicated exclusively to unitarianism would have been a less fitting tribute to the honorand and almost certainly would have become repetitive. The editors were right to invite and include papers on other questions.
A more striking editorial decision is the inclusion of two ‘reflective commentaries’ (by G. and E.M.). G. provides a valuable response to Sedley's chapter on psychology in the Republic (and to Rowe's discussion of the Republic in Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing). It is not surprising that G. wished to contribute something on the subject of psychology, but the unfortunate result is that within this collection Sedley's chapter is singled out for critical treatment. (E.M.'s ‘commentary’ – a discussion of goodness in the Republic – is not really a commentary on previous chapters, but it too returns to Sedley's chapter, albeit with less criticism.) This is all the more jarring as the commentaries are offered in order to make the collection ‘more dialectical’, and Sedley's chapter is already as dialectical as one could reasonably wish a paper to be. In previous publications Sedley has argued that Plato himself wished to show continuity between Platonic and Socratic philosophy, and here he applies this interpretation to the Republic in a manner that is carefully sympathetic to Rowe's unitarianism – above all by setting aside the question whether Plato, in suggesting continuity, was being inaccurate or tendentious. In comparison with Sedley's chapter there are other chapters that more urgently need a ‘dialectical character’. For example, T. Penner's chapter, ‘The Wax Tablet, Logic and Protagoreanism’, a discussion of reference and the substitution of terms in psychological contexts, does not address scholarship on the Theaetetus other than Cornford's.
Sedley's chapter, ‘Socratic Intellectualism in the Republic’s Central Digression', considers why the Republic's discussion of philosophers appears to return to a Socratic, intellectualist psychology, and why tripartite psychology is not more visible there. He argues that tripartition is not abandoned but merely shown to have a limitation: it does not explain what makes the philosopher distinctive, or what is distinctive in the philosopher's virtues. In Sedley's interpretation, Plato distinguishes between three (not two) kinds of virtue: quasi-virtues (or ‘demotic’ virtues), balance in the soul and intellectual purification. Plato needs more than one psychological model if he is to explain the fundamentally different ways in which a soul can be trained and improved, and so Socratic psychology remains indispensable. Three other chapters, besides G.'s, consider continuity between dialogues. Fierro, ‘Two Conceptions of the Body in Plato's Phaedrus’, argues that Plato does not shift in the later dialogues to a more positive view of the body, and suggests that instead an unchanging ambivalence to the body runs from the Phaedo to the Phaedrus and Timaeus. Fierro acknowledges that the Phaedo puts the emphasis on the body's negative effects, but suggests that this is explained by the ‘dramatic context’. It seems to me that not every kind of context can carry this explanatory weight: dramatic context, unlike the historical context external to the dialogue, is just as much Plato's creation as are the arguments and theories he deems appropriate to it, and we cannot assume that he devised the dramatic context first and then let it constrain him. Notomi, ‘Socrates in the Phaedo’, draws out the ethical claims of the Phaedo in order to show continuity between the Phaedo and the Apology. Johansen, ‘Timaeus in the Cave’, considers the relationship between the Republic and Timaeus, and argues that one feature of the prisoner's escape from the cave is increased understanding of the physical cosmos. An important feature of Johansen's interpretation is his claim that, throughout the image of the Cave, seeing stands for understanding. Surely seeing sometimes stands for seeing – at least while the prisoner is inside the cave.
M.M. McCabe, ‘Waving or Drowning? Socrates and the Sophists on Self-knowledge in the Euthydemus’, perhaps has the most to say about Plato's artistry, and she considers not the relationship between dialogues but the structure of a single dialogue. In a subtle account she suggests that Plato did not intend his readers merely to notice fallacies in the sophists' arguments, above all during the discussion of knowledge: Plato is also offering for critical scrutiny an unduly impersonal conception of knowledge, one that loses sight of the human being who owns or possesses knowledge. M. Dixsaut, ‘Macrology and Digression’, similarly considers structure and elevates digression to something positive and ‘progressive’, with the result that speakers such as Protagoras, despite not speaking to the point, try and fail to digress! Digressing is a lot harder than one might suppose.
The Timaeus–Critias and Theaetetus receive particularly close attention. M. Narcy, ‘Why was the Theaetetus Written by Euclides?’, addresses a most interesting question; his answer relies strongly on the fact that Euclides' followers were (at some point – the timing of course makes a difference) called ‘Eristic’. The evidence relating to Euclides gets only short treatment (pp. 151–2) before the chapter turns to the ‘eristic’ Socrates of the Theaetetus (and Euthydemus). Most readers, I suspect, will think that the character of Socrates' arguments – especially in the refutation of Protagoras – is more varied than Narcy allows. U. Zilioli, ‘The Wooden Horse: the Cyrenaics in the Theaetetus’, revives the view that the ‘more subtle’ thinkers of Theaetetus 156a3 are in fact Cyrenaics. S. Broadie and M. Tulli both consider the Atlantis story and its place in the Timaeus and Critias. According to Tulli, the introduction of the story proclaims its superiority to the poems of Homer and Hesiod; I wonder just how impressed Plato's original readers would have been by such a proclamation, and whether Plato would really have expected them to be impressed. Broadie's primary intention is to find some philosophy in the story (or rather in the discussion of the story), but her interpretation also applies a distinction between the ‘dialogue-world’, where the Atlantis story is ‘factually true’, and the world inhabited by Plato's readers, where it is not. That distinction – and the suggestion that Plato can create a pseudo-historical context – may have profound and unsettling consequences for our understanding of context in other dialogues.
Two further highlights are the chapters of D. O'Brien and M. Schofield. In Schofield's chapter, ‘Friendship and Justice in the Laws’, context – now historical, not pseudo-historical – again comes into view. The Laws is shown to elaborate in a deliberately non-utopian manner how a city can be brought towards political unity and friendship, and Schofield shows how Plato reworks, often to startling effect, previous discussions of politics and education, including Spartan propaganda of the late fifth century. O'Brien's chapter, ‘A Form that “Is” of what “Is Not”: Existential Einai in Plato's Sophist’ – the title quotes Sophist 258d6 – pugnaciously promotes an existential interpretation of einai. As long as you can tolerate meta-discussion (‘hardly have those words had time to flow from pen to paper before I hear a sharp expression of dissent’), his chapter is a wonderfully rewarding read.
