How Plato Writes

MALCOLM SCHOFIELD is an Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John's College. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary International Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is recognized as one of the major scholars in the world currently working on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. His first book was An Essay on Anaxagoras (Cambridge, 1980), he co-authored with G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven the second edition of The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1983), and has co-edited numerous other collaborative volumes, including in 2015 with Catherine Rowett a special Heraclitus issue of the journal Rhizomata, and with Tom Griffith a new English edition of Plato's Laws (Cambridge, 2016). He now works mostly on Greek and Roman political philosophy. He was co-editor with Christopher Rowe of The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought (Cambridge, 2000). The Stoic Idea of the City (Cambridge, 1991), Saving the City (1999), Plato: Political Philosophy (2006) and Cicero: Political Philosophy (2021) are among his major solo publications.

• Part I. Approaches to the Corpus: 1. Plato in his Time and Place; 2. When and Why Did Plato Write Narrated Dialogues?; 3. Against System: the Historical Plato in the Mid-Victorian Era; Part II. Argument and Dialogue Architecture: 4. Callicles' Return: Gorgias 509-22 Reconsidered; 5. Likeness and Likenesses in the Parmenides; 6. The Elusiveness of Cratylus in the Cratylus; Part III. Myth and Allegory in the Republic: 7. The Noble Lie; 8. The Cave; Part IV. Projects, Paradoxes, and Literary Registers in the Laws: 9. Religion and Philosophy in the Laws; 10. The Laws' Two Projects; 11. Plato, Xenophon, and the laws of Lycurgus; 12. Injury, Injustice, and the Involuntary in the Laws; 13. Plato's Marionette; 14. Paradoxes of Childhood and Play in Heraclitus and Plato.

'This is a very welcome volume by a very distinguished scholar. The topics include Plato's epistemology and metaphysics, but most of the chapters focus on Plato's ethics, political philosophy, and psychology. In reading the dialogues, Schofield deftly combines literary and historical analysis with analytical rigor and such breadth is rare in Plato interpretation. Any student of Plato will gain much by reading and thinking deeply about the this book.' Chris Bobonich, Stanford University