L. begins his book by asking: ‘Did Plato show Socrates becoming Socrates?’ (p. 1). His answer, indicated by the title of his book, is ‘yes’. He explains that this is the second of two books in which he argues for that conclusion. In the first, How Philosophy Became Socratic: a Study of Plato's Protagoras, Charmides, and Republic (2010), he showed ‘how Plato ordered those three dialogues chronologically to give his reader access to Socrates’ development in devising a successful political philosophy. This second book answers yes by showing how Plato ordered his Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium chronologically to give his reader access to Socrates’ development on philosophy's fundamental questions of being and knowing’ (p. 1). By ‘chronological order’ L. refers to the times at which Plato indicates the conversation(s) related in the dialogues took place – not the ‘chronology of composition’ by Plato, according to which many nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators classified the dialogues as ‘early’, ‘middle’ or ‘late’. In the first book L. argued that Plato shows Socrates learning from his failure to persuade his infamous former associates, Alcibiades and Critias, to practise philosophy as he understood it that he needed to promulgate a public teaching that would preserve public, political order and protect future philosophers like Plato from the kind of persecution Socrates suffered in the end. That public teaching is what is commonly described as the theory of the ideas, which Socrates presents in ‘middle’ dialogues like the Republic, Phaedo and Phaedrus (but which Aristotle attributes to Plato in the Metaphysics in contrast to Socrates’ strictly moral concerns). In the second book L. argues that careful analysis of the account Plato presents of Socrates’ ‘becoming’ or, one might say, his development as a philosopher in sections of the Phaedo, Parmenides and Symposium shows that Socrates did not think his teaching about the ideas was true. He could not have thought that it was true after he had heard and was unable to answer Parmenides’ criticisms of it when he was nineteen years old. The truth Socrates subsequently learned from Diotima, who taught him about eros, the only thing or things (ta erotika) he later claimed to know, is that everything is becoming; nothing is stable or ‘in itself’. That is a terror-provoking insight, L. acknowledges, from which most people need to be protected. As Friedrich Nietzsche argued, philosophers who acquire this wisdom become ‘legislators’, who construct magnificent moralities, according to which other, more credulous and trusting human beings can live. These philosophers rule not as heads of governments, but by persuading others what to believe about what is noble, just and good, the way in which Homer and Hesiod had persuaded the ancient Greeks. According to L.'s explicitly ‘Nietzschean history of philosophy’ Socrates was the first such philosopher.

In both his books on Plato's Socrates L. makes huge and hugely controversial claims – about what Plato shows his readers about Socrates, about the way in which Platonic dialogues should be read, and about their place in a Nietzschean history of philosophy.

L. presents detailed analyses of the beginnings of the six dialogues he treats in most detail. In the Phaedo, Parmenides and Symposium he emphasises the importance of the ‘first words’. He also takes great care to specify the times and historical circumstances in which the conversations occur and are later related by another narrator or narrators to specified individuals or audiences. These analyses are based on careful, one might say pain-staking, analyses of the texts; his analyses of the historical circumstances add great richness and depth to the contexts in which the conversations are set. L. is also particularly adept at bringing out the subtleties of the exchanges between Socrates and his interlocutors. These parts of his books are both useful and informative, especially to readers who teach the dialogues.

In the opinion of this reader, however, the conclusions L. draws from these careful analyses are less so. With regard to the Phaedo, L. asks why Plato shows Socrates promoting the same argument about the ideas he had heard Parmenides refute as a youth. His answer is basically that Socrates lies. As L. argued in an earlier article (‘Socrates’ Defense of Polytropic Odysseus: Lying and Wrong-doing in Plato's Lesser Hippias’, The Review of Politics 64 [2002]), Plato's Socrates takes the place of Homer's hero Odysseus, who is famous for his ability to deceive others. Because Socrates’ last conversation is with interlocutors who subsequently established schools of philosophy, L. maintains (correctly in my view) that the Phaedo particularly concerns Socrates’ legacy. For that reason, L. speculates, Plato has to be the unnamed person who raises questions about Socrates’ argument towards the end of the dialogue, even though Plato writes specifically that he was not present, as he says that he was at Socrates’ trial. Plato had to be present, because Plato was the person most responsible for passing on Socrates’ philosophical legacy. L. does not mention the dream Socrates says has led him to think that he should perhaps have written, and does not, therefore, take up one of the obvious differences between Socrates and Plato or the primary way in which Plato conveyed Socrates’ legacy.

In the second stage of his ‘becoming’, L. argues, Socrates learned that his argument concerning the ideas was not tenable (L. writes ‘irrational’) from the devastating critique Parmenides delivers of it at the beginning of the Parmenides. L. does not take up or respond to any of the critiques other commentators have made of Parmenides’ ‘refutation’ for treating the ideas as if they are spatio-temporal entities, which by definition they are not. Nor does he address alternative interpretations of Parmenides’ aporetic set of hypothetical arguments or the relation between Plato's depiction of Parmenides and the fragments of the Eleatic's own poem. He does not mention the critiques another Platonic philosopher, the ‘Eleatic Stranger’, presents of both Parmenides and Socrates in the Sophist. He simply asserts that Plato's depiction of Parmenides has to be historically accurate, and explicitly relies on an essay by S. Benardete (‘Plato's Pamenides’, in The Archaeology of the Soul [2012]) to support his contention that the lesson Socrates learned by reflecting on Parmenides’ demonstration was that all the things human beings perceive are phantasms, neither real nor true.

In the third stage of his development as a philosopher, L. argues, in the Symposium, Plato has Socrates explain how he learned the only things he ever claims to know – ta erotica – from a priestess named Diotima. She taught him that eros or the principle of generation is the principle of everything, i.e. there is nothing that ‘is’ or persists eternally, unchanged and unchanging, completely intelligible in itself. L. does not mention the non-generative account of eros Socrates presents in the Phaedrus or that Diotima teaches Socrates to examine opinions, which exist between the ‘is’ and ‘is not’ used by Parmenides, instead of the ‘logoi’ of previous philosophers.

L.'s account of ‘how Socrates became Socrates’ raises many more questions than I can mention in a short review. I agree with important aspects of his approach to reading the dialogues. In my 2009 volume (Plato's Philosophers) I devoted a chapter to ‘Socrates Becoming’. Like L., I incorporated Benardete's suggestion about the three stages of Socrates’ development as a philosopher described in sections of the Phaedo, Parmenides and Symposium, but I added more consideration of the Apology and came to different conclusions about the character and practice of Socratic philosophy. Like L., I suggested that Plato indicates the order in which his dialogues should be read by their dramatic dates. However, because there are contradictory indications of the dramatic dates within some of the most important dialogues, I treated the dates merely as hints and included all the dialogues in the narrative concerning the rise, development and limitations of Socratic philosophy I constructed on the basis of them. By presenting Socrates in contrast to four other philosophers, I argued, Plato points to the problems that make philosophy always a search for wisdom, not the possession of it. In this book, as in his previous one, L. concludes on the basis of an intensive analysis of parts of three dialogues that Plato's Socrates and Nietzsche (as well as Descartes and Bacon in another previous study) share the same understanding of philosophy. To say the least, there seems to be a disproportion between the breadth of the conclusion and the relatively narrow range of the study upon which it is supposedly based.