This is a collection of 20 English-language essays on Plato to mark Holger Thesleff's 90th birthday, contributed by some of the most important commentators on Platonic philosophy from within various linguistic and national traditions (the one exception to the Platonic focus is P. Horky's typically learned and rich treatment of Pseudo-Archytas’ On Wisdom, a gesture towards Thesleff's earlier work on Pythagorean philosophy). Thesleff is a significant figure in Plato studies, though perhaps not sufficiently known or read by Platonic interpreters working within the narrow limits of mainstream Anglo-American scholarship. Throughout his decades of publication Thesleff has insisted that many assumptions involved in establishing a chronology of Plato's writing based on theories of Plato's philosophical development are unjustified, as are commonly accepted orthodoxies about which dialogues are authentically Plato's and which are not. Thesleff's learned criticisms of these orthodoxies ought to be considered by all Platonic scholars, and his scepticism about them applied to his own positive suggestions about questions of chronology and authenticity.
One of the best contributions, F.J. Gonzalez's ‘Erōs and Dialectic in Plato's Phaedrus’, addresses problems with establishing any chronology among the dialogues. Based on principles derived from his rich reading of the Phaedrus, Gonzalez convincingly offers a way of seeing the dialogues ‘as divided into partial perspectives on the truth, where each perspective has its own unity and integrity and where the ultimate unity which would bring all these perspectives together is missing, being a unity that the dialogues can only provoke us into desiring’ (p. 185). Outside of this essay, however, the collection is less focused on Thesleff's work on chronology and authenticity than on certain methodological developments he has influenced: the appreciation of the philosophical and interpretative importance of literary and dramatic details in Plato's writing; the need to consider the historical situation of the dialogues and their characters; the importance of careful philological attention to the style of Plato's Greek. (On the latter topic, J. Stolpe, who translated all the dialogues into Swedish, offers a lovely meditation on the challenges and joys of bringing Plato's Greek into another language.) G. Press's contribution, ‘Changing Course in Plato Studies’, with copious references to key figures in Plato interpretation, traces this turn that Thesleff's work helped initiate. Press's state-of-the-discipline overview would be an excellent preliminary background reading to assign for a seminar on Platonic philosophy.
Certain contributions offer a narrower focus on particular expressions or phrases. A.G. Wersinger-Taylor investigates Glaucon's astonished reply upon hearing about the Good's transcendence of essence at Republic 509b6–c4 (Ἄπολλον … δαιμονίας ὑπερβολῆς). H. Tarrant proposes an emendation of Second Alcibiades 147a1–4. R. Benitez treats Socrates’ consideration at Apology 40c about what death might be like, and argues that οἷον μηδὲν εἶναι (‘like being nothing’) ought to be understood not as the total annihilation of the soul but as its ceasing to perceive, an interpretation that makes Apology and Phaedo at least potentially compatible. Each of these contributions is well worth reading for someone thinking through the passages in question.
Other studies, while still focused on particular questions in particular dialogues, are slightly more wide-ranging in their scope and significance. D. El Murr reflects on the epistemological effect of using paradigms in the Statesman. D. Nails rejects (1) the orthodox view that Diotima in Symposium is a Platonic creation, (2) that she represents an instance of Plato's proto-feminism and (3) that the speech of Diotima represents Plato's own view of love. Her essay will be an important touchstone for people considering why she is introduced at the apex of that dialogue's argument. A.-M. Schultz deepens one of Thesleff's provocative interpretative claims, that Plato had written an earlier version of Theaetetus which Socrates narrated directly, instead of the Euclides-Terpsion frame in the version we have. She suggests that putting the entire narrative in the voice of Socrates would involve an identification of his individual perspective with the truth in line with the Protagorean relativism the argument of the dialogue seeks to overturn. C. Rowe offers a re-consideration of the sixth definition of the sophist, the γένει γενναία σοφιστική from Sophist 231b, which appears to resemble Socrates so closely.
Certain contributions offer useful over-arching theses for how to interpret the dialogues in relation to one another. M. Erler discusses passages in the dialogues where Plato seems to make explicit reference to another dialogue and then indicates a view which diverges from it, arguing that these intertextual divergences do not signify a change of mind (a philosophical development) but rather different answers suited to the different contexts of each dialogue in question (a literary strategy). In ‘The Mask of Dialogue’ M. Regali traces the representation of Socrates through the dialogues to outline a consistent portrayal, dominated by his dependence on others (whether divine or human) and his absolute sincerity. T. Szlezák further develops his well-known arguments about the relationship between Platonic writing and the oral, unwritten doctrines, through an essay devoted to the deliberately open gaps in the argumentation on crucial points which cannot be adequately communicated through writing. J.J. Mulhern, in ‘Plato's Putative Mouthpiece and Ancient Authorial Practice: the Case of Homer’, ingeniously tackles the question of whether the character of Socrates is employed by Plato as the mouthpiece for Plato's own philosophical views, through tracking all the references Plato makes to Homer throughout the dialogues to find out whether Homeric characters are treated as mouthpieces of the poet.
While there is no doubt in my mind that the turn Thesleff helped inaugurate towards taking seriously historical, literary and linguistic details is a significant improvement upon approaches that ignored these dimensions of Platonic writing, there is a tendency among interpreters who follow this path to view Platonic dialogues as maintaining an endlessly open attitude to the truth without taking any determinate philosophical positions. Understandably, readings like these will have less direct discussion of metaphysical theses. Thesleff's interpretation tends in this open-ended, anti-dogmatic direction, though he is still willing to speak of two levels of reality. (This two-level view is developed in N.F. Alican's ‘A Horse is a Horse, of Course, of Course, but What about Horseness?’, an appealingly breezy and informal tour through the question of whether there are ‘two worlds’ in Platonic thought.) Given the erasure of metaphysics one sometimes finds in these approaches, it is a relief (at least for my own philosophical sensibility) to read certain contributions that, while accepting the importance of literary, historical and linguistic details, remain unabashedly willing to risk discussing the highest metaphysical principles independently of the details of how they are expressed in the dialogues. R. Ferber and G. Damschen weigh whether the claim that the Good is beyond ousia means that it is beyond being or beyond essence, and construct a fifteen-step proof for the non-being of the Form of the Good. I would single out L.P. Gerson's contribution, ‘Ideas of Good?’, as a particularly exciting and philosophically direct investigation into the nature of Plato's first principle, specifically, the relation between the superordinate good beyond essence and a coordinate form of the good, which is an essence among other essences. Gerson appeals to Aristotle's account of Plato's teachings along with Proclus’ commentary on the Republic, but above all to his own clear and compelling philosophical argumentation, to conclude that both ideas of the Good are needed, and are in fact implied by careful reading of certain key passages from the dialogues. My own favourite essay, M. Miller on the Symposium, ‘Making New Gods: a Reflection on the Gift of the Symposium’, beautifully unites attention to literary and dramatic detail with a robust metaphysical reflection. It is one of the richest and most profound discussions of the Symposium I have read.
The editors have done a superb job in bringing together a varied and uniformly strong collection of essays on Plato, a small number of which I would judge to be truly indispensable reading for Plato scholars. Hopefully, this collection might also help introduce new readers to Holger Thesleff's substantial body of Platonic scholarship, which has recently been conveniently compiled and republished by Parmenides Press in a single volume, Platonic Patterns: a Collection of Studies by Holger Thesleff (2009).
