If you’ve ever wondered why Plato staged Timaeus as a kind of sequel to Republic, or who its unnamed missing fourth might be; or why he joined Critias to Timaeus, and whether or not that strange dialogue is unfinished; or what we should make of the written critique of writing in Phaedrus, and of that dialogue’s apparent lack of unity; or what is the purpose of the long discussion of the One in the second half of Parmenides, and how it relates to the objections made to the Theory of Forms in its first half; or if the revisionists or unitarians are right about Philebus, and why its Socrates seems less charming than usual, or whether or not Cratylus takes place after Euthyphro, and whether its far-fetched etymologies accomplish any serious philosophical purpose; or why the philosopher Socrates describes in the central digression of Theaetetus is so different from Socrates himself; then you will enjoy reading the continuation of William H. F. Altman’s Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington; 2012), where he considers the pedagogical connections behind “the post-Republic dialogues” from Timaeus to Theaetetus in the context of “the Reading Order of Plato’s dialogues.”
William H. F. Altman, an independent scholar now living in Brazil, is a retired public high school teacher with more than thirty years experience teaching history, Latin, and the humanities.
Preface: Plato the Teacher and the post-Republic DialoguesIntroduction: The Guardians in Action1 Timaeus-Critias: “A Deceptive Cosmos of Words”1. Cicero and Taylor’s Timaeus2. Plato’s Parmenidean Pedagogy3. Demiurge, World Soul, and Receptacle4. The Missing Speech of the Absent Fourth5. Critias, Phaedrus, and the Theological-Political Problem2 Phaedrus as Fair Warning6. “Whither, forsooth, and Whence?”7. The Science of Deception8. Introducing Collection and Division9. The Three Speeches10. Rereading Phaedrus3 Parmenides as Preliminary Training 11. The Problem of the One and the Many12. Three Dianoetic Interventions13. Plato’s Trinity and Young Socrates4 Philebus: “As if in Battle”14. The Restoration15. The Most Difficult Test: ???es?? e?? ??s?a?16. Philebus and Reading Order5 Beginning of the End: Cratylus and Theaetetus 17. False Assumptions and Midwifery18. The Theaetetus Digression as Crisis: Fight or Flight?19. Looking Forward and Bac
Altman does an admirable job of separating Plato from his later reception (i.e. he makes a very conscious attempt to disentangle Plato’s own views from subsequent Platonism) and the volume is particularly rich in terms of the range of topics treated and number of challenges posed to the commonly held view of Plato. Enlightening as it is to read the Platonic dialogues on their own, our understanding of them is certainly enhanced when they can be used to illuminate one another, and Altman supplies the reader with numerous examples of how this can function in the case of the dialogues under discussion. Altman has produced a thought-provoking book that stretches across an extensive canvas and re-evaluates the nature and interrelationship of some of Plato’s most enduring works.
