Agora, Academy, and the Conduct of Philosophy offers extremely careful and detailed criticisms of some of the most important assumptions scholars have brought to bear in beginning the process of (Platonic) interpretation. It goes on to offer a new way to group the dialogues, based on important facts in the lives and philosophical practices of Socrates - the main speaker in most of Plato's dialogues - and of Plato himself. Both sides of Debra Nails's arguments deserve close attention: the negative side, which exposes a great deal of diversity in a field that often claims to have achieved a consensus; and the positive side, which insists that we must attend to what we know of these philosophers' lives and practices, if we are to make a serious attempt to understand why Plato wrote the way he did, and why his writings seem to depict different philosophies and even different approaches to philosophizing. From the Preface by Nicholas D. Smith.

Inhalt

Preface; N.D. Smith. List of Tables. List of Abbreviations. Part I: A Metaphilosophical Task. 1: Introduction. 2: The Socratic Problem. 3: The Platonic Question. Part II: The Developmental Hypothesis. 4: The Early Middle Late Consensus: How Deep? How Broad? 5: The Content of the Dialogues. 6: Stylometric Investigations. 7: Thesleff's Philological Undermining of Developmentalism. Part III: Havelock's Hypothesis: Plato Overturns the Oral Tradition. 8: Socrates Oralist, Plato Textualist. 9: Literacy in Fifth Century Athens. 10: The Anthropological Evidence and Where it Falls. Part IV: The Conduct of Philosophy. 11: Socrates in the Agora. 12: Plato in the Academy. Bibliography. Index of Passages. General Index.